Why Your WordPress Website Need a Plugin Audit

1. Why Your WordPress Website Need a Plugin Audit As the digital world gets more and more competitive, issues like slow website performance can be become the sole reason for your visitors to turn to one of your competitors for respite. It turns out that often plugins are the reason for slow load time and a lagging website, especially when it comes to Wordpress based websites. However, straight up uninstalling the plugin can sometime cause even more problems instead of making the situation better. Managing a website can be challenging especially if you are not so tech savvy yourself. Hence, a lot of the time, entrepreneurs and businesses hire professional service providers like WPPals for plugin update services and more. However, with this blog, we will give you an overview of how you can audit your WordPress plugins and identify which ones to keep and which ones to safely remove. Why You Must Perform Your Plugin Audit Regularly: Website design is constantly evolving which means over time there is naturally going to be the need to change one plugin for another. On the other hand, sometime plugins also become obsolete or they just aren't a good fit for your website anymore. It is also possible that some new plugins better suit your specific needs or the new version is supposed to boost your website performance or speed. These are just a few reasons why you must conduct a plugin audit after regular intervals. A plugin audit will help you identify all these possible situations and help you make more informed decisions for your website.

2. Regular audit of your WordPress site can be very good for the overall performance of your website, but you must immediately schedule one in case you notice any of the following signs: The admin section is specifically lagging badly Your website is performing slower than the usual You are getting 503 error on your site How You Can Perform A Plugin Audit? The first thing you must do before you even begin is to ensure you have a recent backup of your website. Your WordPress maintenance services are likely to take care of this, but in case you don't have a WordPress support plan, you will have to do it manually. To create a manual backup you will have to create a copy of your web files, to avoid any unfortunate situations. This is because, during Plugin audits, some changes can occur that might harm your data, even erasing it completely sometimes. So to save yourself from such an issue, create a backup first. Once you have created a backup, click on 'Plugins' on your WordPress admin menu and take a note of every plugin that is currently installed on your site. The plugins that are inactive should be safe to delete, as they are not currently being used. However, you might want read through them just to be sure. Review the list of all active plugins, keep the ones you really need and deactivate the plugins that you don't. How To Uninstall The Plugins That You Don't Need: Make sure you deactivate the plugins that you don't need any more and check if it affects your website's functionality before uninstalling them. This also works as a smart way to double-check if you really don't need a plugin. If you deactivate a plugin and check your site to find that some functions or actions are broken, it means that you probably need that plugin. After you have effectively deactivated all the plugins that you don't need, check your website again and look for issues. See if the front end is looking okay, how the mobile version is coming through, and does the admin area work fine. These are just a few aspects to look through to ensure that these plugin updates or removals didn’t affect the overall functioning of your website in any aspect. If it all looks to be working smooth, go back to the plugins section from your WordPress dashboard and finally uninstall all plugins you deactivated. Wrap Up: This may seem simple enough, but doing this regularly can be time-consuming and in case you actually have tech issues, you probably won’t be able to handle it. Hence, it is better to hire a professional WordPress support team like WP Pals to look after your WordPress website.