Hey Reader,
When someone tells me their website feels slow, there's one place I look before anything else: their plugins.
Because a lot of times half of those aren't necessary anymore.
- You install one for a specific thing and decide to not do the thing.
- You switch themes and the old plugins stay behind.
- Someone helps you with the site, adds a few tools, and moves on. You have no clue what they are or do.
- You try something out and forget to remove it.
None of it feels like much at the time. But a couple of years in, you've got twenty-five, thirty plugins running, and if you're honest, you couldn't say what half of them actually do.
And that adds up, Reader. Every active plugin is more code your site has to load before anyone sees your page. More plugins usually means a slower site, and a slow site loses people before they've read a single word.
It's not just speed, either.
The plugins you've forgotten about are often the abandoned ones, the ones their makers stopped updating. That's exactly where security gaps creep in. Others might quietly interfere with a plugin you actually rely on. And the more you're running, the more likely two of them clash and quietly break something.
The good news is you almost certainly don't need all of them. Most sites run perfectly happily on far fewer than people expect. The trick is working out which ones are earning their place and which are just weight.
You can absolutely do this yourself. I wrote a full guide on how to go through your plugins properly, one at a time, spotting the duplicates and the dead weight: why your website is probably slow.
Or, if the idea of deactivating plugins one by one and hoping nothing breaks makes you want to close the tab, that's what the Website Tech Audit is for. For €99, I go through your site and send you back a short report: what's slowing you down, what's out of date, what can safely go, and what to tackle first so nothing breaks. Then you can clear it out yourself, or let us handle it for you.
If you'd like one, just hit reply and say the word.