Worst WordPress Plugins Ever – AVOID THEM

I’ve made lists sharing my favorite plugins but never made a list of bad plugins. These are probably equally important to know as they’re known to cause many issues with sites, causing poor performance or conflicting with other plugins. I include the most popular “bad” ones below.

Bad WordPress plugins:

• Jetpack – probably public enemy #1. Shame on WordPress/Automattic for pushing resource hog on unsuspecting users. Jetpack is awful and slow even when you disable all modules. Between you and I, I think it’s there to spy on your sites and report back to Automattic. They only add “features” to it to justify you having it installed. Every feature it has you can find elsewhere for better performance. Want stats? Go with Google Analytics. Want image compression? Go with ShortPixel. Want related posts or content embeds, there are plugins for this! Want security features? Look elsewhere!
• Slider Revolution (REV Slider) – awful bloated image slider plugin that comes bundled with many bloated themes. You can always take it out and replace with Metaslider or Smart Slider 3. Soliloquy used to be great/lightweight but has now been surpassed.
• UberMenu – seems fancy but mega bloat! It loads more CSS/JS than even a WordPress theme. If you really need a fancy menu, I suggest using Max Mega Menu instead.
• Contact Form 7 – I hate it for 2 main reasons: loading global its CSS/JS on every page, and not storing entries by default. Use Caldera instead.
• Most pagebuilders in general.

OK plugins, but some caveats:

• Widget Options – great plugin but adds about 150kb of autoload. It’s ok for a lightweight site but I think a little heavy for already big sites.
• Query Monitor – great for diagnosing things but don’t leave it running. It’ll slow down your admin section.

I’ll be adding more to this list regularly. Have others I should know about? Leave a comment below!