Most of this section only applies if you move onto our hosting services. Get in touch if you have any questions.
There are more than 54,000 plugins for WordPress out in the universe and most of them are going to work splendidly on our hosting platform. However, there are a few categories of plugins that either duplicate functionality that RelyWP already provides, or are known performance-killers on sites.
We believe that users shouldn’t have to “fiddle” with their site to get the best performance and security. As your WordPress maintenance expert, and managed hosting provider, our goal is to make sure you’re starting out with a site that just works.
Backup plugins
We already have you covered on the backup front. We back up every site each and every night on external servers. These are stored for atleast 30 days. Backups can be easily restored by our team, or we can send you a download of your backups.
Backup plugins, on the other hand, are incredibly resource-hungry. When running, they can take a big bite out of the resources you need to deliver content to your visitors and really slow your site down at inopportune times. For larger sites, some of the MySQL queries can even take your site offline. These plugins also often store large backup files on your server, which can unnecessarily fill up your disk space.
Examples of disallowed Backup plugins:
If you’d like to keep your own backups in additions to the ones we keep, feel free to contact us (via ticket or chat on the client area) and we’d be happy to send you a copy of of a recent backup.
Note: If you do want a regular backup in addition to RelyWP’s nightly backup, try choosing a plugin which allows you to store backups offsite like VaultPress. Your site’s performance will still take a hit while the process is running. In an attempt to keep data usage to a minimum, we’d advise you only allow the plugin to store of one day’s backup on the site itself.
Caching plugins
We handle caching for you at the server level, including the use of Redis caching. Server-side caching is significantly more efficient and scalable than any plugin-based caching, as it doesn’t rely on PHP at all. This aside, caching plugins run the risk of interfering with the caching we already have in place.
We will provide you with free installation and license of “WP Rocket” which will handle things like JavaScript and CSS file minification and concatenation, as well as GZIP Compression, Database Optimization Fonts Optimization and more.
These are tasks which are ideally handled at the site development level, however WP Rocket will help if the necessary optimisations are required. WP Rocket is the only “performance” plugin that is supported on our hosting platform, and does not conflict with our server side caching & performance features in any way. We recommend not using caching features of any plugins without asking us, we will take care of this for you.
WP Smush Pro plugin is also available for free to install on your site, and is supported on our platform. This plugin will help with optimisation & compression of your images.
We will also perform other routine performance scans and optimisations on your website to keep it blazing fast!
Security plugins
Our servers are configured specifically with WordPress security best practices, and we have server-level blocking and scanning for hackers and malware. We prevent brute force attacks, lock down core WordPress files, and take many other security measures for you.
We will install WP Defender on your site to help handle some other security hardening features, and we’d suggest you leave the setup of these security features to us.
Note: Our hosting offers a solid baseline of security for all sites. We also keep all plugins (and in some cases themes) up to date as older code has had more time to get cracked by the bad guys. Additionally, hiding your WordPress login, requiring a CAPTCHA or single-sign-on, having strong usernames and passwords all will help keep your site safe from the unsavory types on the web. We will help with all of this!
Related Post Plugins
In general, if you aren’t manually assigning related posts, any plugin that is automatically showing related posts is going to be doing so via a barrage of MySQL queries that happen on each and every page load. The end result is often a devastating hit on your site’s performance and substantial damage to your database.
Examples of disallowed Related Posts plugins:
- Yet Another Related Posts Plugin
- Contextual Related Posts
- SEO Auto Links & Related Posts
- Similar Posts
Since crawling over all your posts and establishing connections automatically requires some a lot of horsepower, we’d recommend one of these external related post services to perform the same function without the performance consequences.
Link Checker Plugins
Like some of the other listed plugin categories here, the ongoing jobs run by these plugins can be really taxing on your server and steal resources that your visitors need to view your site in a timely fashion.
Examples of disallowed Link Checker plugins:
Note: On our Professional plan, we’ll handle broken link checking for you.
Plugins with known issues
- SMTP email plugins tend to interfere with our server mail sending, and run the risk of preventing your site from sending any emails at all. You should leave the setup of this to us.
- EWWW Image Optimizer and other plugins rely on the exec() function, which we may disable for security purposes. We don’t have any issue with image optimization plugins in general, though; in fact, we encourage them, as long as they compress existing image files and don’t create duplicates (since that could fill up your site’s disk space very quickly).
- Any plugin that specifically modifies .htaccess will not work on our hosting platform, since .htaccess is an Apache file and our hosting runs NGINX.
Other things to watch out for
The TimThumb image resizing script is embedded in lots of older themes and plugins built from about 2000–2014, but it is no longer supported or updated, so it’s a vulnerability. Besides, it tends to break things anyway. Stick with the image optimization plugins recommended above.
Along with TimThumb, Sucuri reports that outdated versions of Gravity Forms and RevSlider contribute to a high number of security incidents and vulnerabilities with WordPress sites. This is largely because these plugins are frequently embedded in themes and aren’t updated. As long as your theme is kept up-to-date and you are running the latest versions of these plugins, you shouldn’t have issues, but it’s worth double-checking.
Note that certain plugins run database queries to work, and these interfere with caching, which will slow down a site. These include (but are not limited to) Broken Link Checker (which also doesn’t play well with Staging/cloning) and some “related posts” plugins.
We take this issue very seriously and try our best to strike a balance between freedom, security, and performance. If you have any issues, we’re happy to work with you to figure out the best solution for your site!
This is by no means an exhaustive list, but gives you a sense for the types of plugins that we strongly discourage and/or don’t allow. If you have any questions about a particular plugin and whether it is allowed, don’t hesitate to contact us.