Five WordPress Plugins that Hamper Your Shared Server’s Performance

Popular among several bloggers and web developers, WordPress is the easiest and most user-friendly platform for creating blogs and websites.  

For your blog to get known globally you need to host. It and the host you choose is the most significant link to the potential readers of your blog. When hosting comes into the picture different aspects like speed, performance, load balance ability, etc.

Facts and Statistics –

As per Google speed is one of the important metrics to rank in search results. And if a website takes more than 1.5 seconds to load, it considered to be slow by Google. Also, 74% of mobile users will leave after five seconds, if the site doesn’t load. Most WordPress blogs hosted on shared hosting plans.

In shared hosting, several websites are hosted on a single web server, and the resources on shared among every customer account on the machine.  Shared hosting is the most limited hosting plan available on the web. But there are chances of the website crashing on it which is due to the plugins.

Below is a list of some popular plugins that avoided on WordPress Shared Hosting –

• Google XML Sitemaps –
  Since Google XML Sitemaps is server intensive, it can easily strain your shared hosting server.
  

  Alternatives –

  1. WordPress SEO Plugin – Popular WordPress SEO plugin suggested by Yoast offers an inbuilt Sitemap option. Which recommend option and so, there isn’t a requirement of installing another plugin.
  2. Better WordPress Google XML Sitemaps – It doesn’t have a 50,000 URL limit and is speedy in generating your sitemap with limited resources.
  3. Google Sitemap Plugin – This plugin allows you to create and add a simple Sitemap file to Google Webmaster Tools without overloading your server.

• Broken Link Checker –
  

  It’s better to use Broken Link Checker during low traffic time and then disable it after usage. Its high server-intensive ability overcomes your shared hosting server.

  Alternatives –

  1. Xenu Link Sleuth – It’s a valuable Windows app available for free. That permits you to check for broken links on the website.
  2. Integrity – Free Mac-only app that tests your website to find broken links. It checks images along with internal and external links.
  3. Broken Link Check – It’s an online tool that checks your website for broken links. There is a free version available of this tool that has a 3000-page limit. But this shouldn’t be a problem for several WordPress installs.

• Related Post Plugin –
  

  Being extremely database intensive, the Related Post plugin carries out the indexing, sorting, and all functions using your server’s resources.

  Alternatives –

  1. SO Related Posts – The SO Related Posts plugin allows you to select the posts you want to display, and the order in which related posts are displayed. Right from the post editor as well as the number of posts.
  2. Jetpack by WordPress.com – It is one of the great alternatives to related posts that scans your posts, analyzes them, and displays related posts to visitors. The Jetpack cloud analyzes, processes, and serves which isn’t done in other plugins which reduces the additional load on your server.
  3. LinkWithin – It displays related posts from the blog archives under each post. One of the benefits of LinkWithin is that it doesn’t consume your server resources. As it catalogs all stories from the blog archive and exhibits them on appropriate posts.

• WordPress Popular Posts –
  

  This is a widget plugin that presents the most popular posts on your blog but avoids on shared servers.

  Alternative –

  There’s no alternative required for this as the task done manually. Simply go to your site stats, find out the 5 most popular blog posts. And display them on your sidebar using the Text widget.

• WP-Post Views –
  

  It is best to avoid WP-Post Views plugin on shared hosting servers as it writes to the database each time the page gets loaded which leads to consumption of server resources.

  Alternatives –

  1. Google Analytics – It is one of the most popular tools to analyze website traffic.
  2. Jetpack Plugin – There is a stats module in the Jetpack plugin which is an ideal choice for traffic analysis on a website.

Also, plugins like WP DB Manager, WP DB Backup, and Backup WordPress use only when required. Tons of disk space occupied by the backups and also it interacts rigorously with your database and so the plugins use only during low-traffic periods and disabled after use.