Do Inactive Plugins Affect Your WordPress Website?
WordPress plugins play a very important role in web development. They simplify the whole process of web development by reducing time that would have been spent in coding. There are plugins for almost everything right from automatic backup to editing plugins and so on. But the big question is should you delete the inactive plugins? To better answer this question, you need to understand how the inactive plugins affect your WordPress website.
What are inactive or deactivated plugins?
Plugins make it easy for you to extend WordPress. You can download and install free or premium plugins. However, for the installed plugin to work, it has to be activated. It is possible to download as many plugins as you want and activate them later on. It is also possible for you to deactivate plugins that you no longer use. To do this, you have to be on the WordPress admin area. Here you can view all the plugins that have been installed and their status.
What is the impact of inactive plugins on website speed?
The first thing you need to understand about the inactive plugins is that they will not slow your website. When a page request is made, WordPress usually initiates a loading process. This process involves the loading of all the active plugins. The deactivated WordPress plugins will not be loaded. This simply means that they will not affect the load speed. The inactive plugins are ignored.
With that been said, regardless of how many inactive plugins you have, they will not impact the load speed of your WordPress website. They will not affect the performance of your website in any way. If you notice that your website is slow, inactive plugins have nothing to do with that.
Why delete inactive plugins?
WordPress gives you the option of deactivating plugins as well as the option to delete them. The deactivation feature is available because there are times when you need to turn off certain plugins temporarily. The option is viable if you feel you might need the plugin later on.
If you don’t need the plugin, there is no reason why you shouldn’t just delete it. Having too many inactive website plugins on your website will problematic at times. A key reason why this is problematic is because whether the plugin is active or not, WordPress will still show you their updates. This can be annoying if you have too many inactive plugins. Another thing you need to note is that inactive plugins can still be exploited by hackers. As a precaution, you need to delete the inactive plugins.
There is no harm in having inactive WordPress plugins on your website. However, there are secondary problems which include hacking. If you no longer need a plugin, you should delete it. This will even make your database cleaner.