Avoiding Excessive CPU Usage: Don’t Use These WordPress Plugins

If your website is running on WordPress CMS, you can always add new features to your website using WordPress plugins. However, things get nasty when your site is visited by more and more people – you risks your website for getting suspended by your web hosting company due to excessive CPU usage.

If your blog runs on a shared hosting or a reseller hosting account, you are literally share resources with many others. When your web hosting provider is overselling or one of the users shared the same server as you use too much resources, your website load time can be very slow – even yours can appear down.

Mainly due to those two reasons, web hosting providers are suspending accounts that use too much web server resources. Some of the most common websites get suspended are those powered by WordPress.

WordPress itself is not resource consuming: Badly-written WP plugins’ codes and WP plugins that simply take too much resources to perform their purposes do.

Some web hosting providers that are not WP savvy are recommending to minimize the use of plugins. This is ridiculous really. Plugins are the backbone of WordPress – those are what making WP-powered sites stand above the rest. Asking clients to use minimal plugin counts doesn’t make sense.

However, I do understand that some WP plugins are simply badly written. If you are not a techie, you should read forum posts to learn whether a particular plugin is bad for your web server or not.

There are also plugins that are taking too much server resources simply because they need the resources to do what they offer. Those are the plugins that you and I should avoid to prevent your sites from getting suspended for excessive CPU usage (or else you might want to consider a VPS hosting.)

This is a great list from WP Engine that shows you which WP Plugins to avoid because they take too much CPU power to perform their tasks:

• Broken Link Checker – Pounds the server with HTTP requests.
• Dynamic Related Posts – Almost all “Related Posts” plugins suffer from the same fundamental problems regarding MySQL, indexing, and search making most very database intensive.
• WP Smushit – Relies on Yahoo services and memory mapping… When Yahoo fails or memory mapping is exceeded, the plugin fails and brings down sites with it.
• MyReviewPlugin (MyRP) – SLAMS the database with writes at orders of magnitude.
• LinkMan – Related to MyRP.
• Google XML Sitemaps – More info here.
• SEO Auto Links & Related Posts – Creates large and inefficient queries which load down the database
• Fuzzy Seo Booster – Thrashes MySQL
• WP PostViews – inefficiently writes to the database on every pageload. Try something like Automattic’s stats or Google Analytics to track traffic in a scalable manner.
• Tweet Blender
• Yet Another Related Post Plugin – Does FULLTEXT indexes on MySQL which does not scale.
• Similar Posts – Does FULLTEXT indexes on MySQL which does not scale.
• Contextual Related Posts – Does FULLTEXT indexes on MySQL which does not scale.

Source of the list: WP Engine

Share on Facebook

Post on X

Follow us

Save