The great plugin purge and other tweakery
If you’ve visited The Spicy Cauldron before, you’ll notice there have been some changes made in addition to the site going members-only. Everything should be a heck of a lot faster to load into your browser than it was before the weekend, whatever your connection speed.
The front page from now on will carry one, maybe two, posts and no more than that. There are fewer plugins offering bells-and-whistles, less widgets taking up sidebar space. The focus now is on the core content—which is, after all, everyone’s primary interest—and on having a clean, uncluttered and unintimidating design.
I discovered a number of plugins were resource hogs, meaning they sucked up lots of computer processing power and made the site slow. Even the administrative behind-the-scenes pages were running at an unacceptable crawl before the great plugin purge. The dashboard (as it’s called) took forever to get some bits to load or for changes I made to be saved.
So I’ve gone all minimalist—from having lots of plugins and widgets to just a very small number that perform very useful functions—useful as in truly enhancing the end-user experience of the site.
tags: badges, blogging, code, load times, minimalism, plugins, resource hog, web design, WordPress
