While playing around with BlogRush, I came across this post that struck a big nerve.
The author make the comment:
“Get rid of those RIDICULOUS social media links at the bottom of every post. The only people who have the power to get any of your posts ranking well in Social Media Networks don’t need the little buttons to do it. If they think you’re worthy, they’ll submit regardless.”
Wow, did he hit the nail on the head here. In fact, I will go even further to say that I have tested blogs with and without those annoying little “bookmark me” icons and I have found that they make absolutely NO DIFFERENCE whatsoever in your traffic.
Fact is, people will never use them, and they only serve to clutter up your blog. Remove them… please.
If you want the benefit of social bookmarking I suggest you look into an automated bookmarking solution like the Auto Social Poster plugin (shameless plug). Anyway, back to my rant…
Another thing you need to remove is unnecessary, out-dated plugins!
On a daily basis I get administrative access to a lot of Wordpress blogs. Not just my own, but dozens and dozens of blogs run by others.
After seeing thousands of blogs, you start to see some patterns emerge. One pattern is the use of plugins that are just not needed. Not only are many not needed, they can interfere with the functioning of your blog!
So I’m going to go further and list 5 plugins that you simply do not need!
1. sociable
This plugin adds those little icons at the end of your posts. There are many plugins that do this as well, but this is by far the most popular. As I stated earlier, they are simply not needed. They serve absolutely no purpose., and may turn many visitors off. Clean up your blog and dump these types of plugins!
2. wp-cache
This plugin caches your web pages enabling your server to display more pages faster when you get huge spikes in traffic. The key phrase being “WHEN YOU GET HUGE SPIKES IN TRAFFIC”.
Basically, if you need this plugin, then your blog is smoking. If your blog is new or if you get a few hundred visitors a day YOU DO NOT NEED IT! If you don’t have the traffic, don’t use it!
You should also know that this plugin interferes with many, MANY other plugins that you may actually want to use… Unless you are perezhilton.com, dump it.
3. no ping wait
The purpose of this plugin was to speed up the pinging process and prevent your post page from timing out when pinging large numbers of ping servers. It modified the ping function so that Wordpress didn’t require each ping to be complete before the post was added.
Back in the days of WP 1.5 when bloggers were pinging hundreds of ping servers, this plugin had it’s place. But now, it’s not needed for several reasons.
First, you will never want to ping a huge number of ping servers. It’s just spammy and you will receive no long term benefit. NONE.
Second, current versions of Wordpress do not have this time out issue. Pinging is very fast in Wp 2.1+, so the plugin actually does nothing. Dump it!
This plugin was created to stop the default Wordpress behavior of pinging a post when it is edited. It worked well, but current versions of Wordpress do not support it’s function so it doesn’t work. That’s right, if you have this plugin active, it’s not doing anything! Dump it!
Wordpress will still ping edited posts, but who cares? This is not a critical issue unless you are editing your post 20-30 times, lol.
5. wp-cron
The purpose of this plugin was to automate tasks from within Wordpress. For example, if you need to check your Wordpress database every hour. You can set this up using wp-cron. Now this plugin still works with older versions of Wordpress, but it’s not needed in Wordpress 2.1+ or higher. New versions of Wordpress already have a cron feature built-in.
The only reason to install and activate wp-cron is if you have an old plugin that requires wp-cron in order to function. In that case get the developer to update their plugin!
That Wasn’t So Bad…
OK, that’s #5. Of course there’s plenty more that could be dumped as well, however these are the ones I come across most often. If someone is still recommending these plugins, tell them to wake up and update their recommendations!
[tags]wordpress plugins, wp-cache, sociable, smart update pinger, no ping wait, wp-cron[/tags]
Snowboardjohn said on Monday, September 24, 2007
Thanks for mentioning me in your blog
Great blog you’ve got here - enjoying looking around!
Marco Richter said on Tuesday, September 25, 2007
Great list. I have collected an A-Z-List of MUST-HAVE WP Plugins on my post, maybe this might interest you.
jason ciment said on Tuesday, September 25, 2007
This is a great idea of updating the required plugings. You can go a step further like Firefox does and get the plugins to self-evaluate if they are working. that would be nice. I’ve got so many plugins running on my magazine subscription site it’s crazy.
Randy said on Tuesday, September 25, 2007
Anthony, That was a great list to start. We all know there are many more that dont work and should go away. Also, dont worry about the shameless plug. You have some awsome products so keep up the great work.
Thanks, Randy
Matt Ellsworth said on Tuesday, September 25, 2007
we use wp-cache - and i can say that the blog runs noticeably faster with it - than without. sure we don’t get the worlds greatest amount of traffic - but it makes a difference. Our blog is hosted on a clustered server - and the disk access is faster than the mysql access.
James Lee said on Tuesday, September 25, 2007
But I like the little icon thingy’s on my blog posts…lol. Kidding. I’ll kill the plugin as I’m using one of your plugins that ensures my stuff gets bookmarked.
Rick Butts said on Tuesday, September 25, 2007
LOL - what is funny is that I actually use those little icons when I find a post I like - I figure I am doing the blogger a favor by tagging them.
I suspect that I am not alone.
I don’t want to be controversial - but in this case I’d like to simply offer my opinion that while they may never set the world on fire (but who has data on this?),
for a kind of peripheral blogger like me (smile) who doesn’t have much blogging experience, they do two things…
1. They prompt me to THINK about bookmarking and tagging a site
2. They give me an easy way to do it - as I don’t keep a bunch of toolbar quicklink icons up for tagging stuff.
So that is my two cents on getting rid of the bookmarking icons.
If they were on this blog - I might have tagged it!
Smiles and Happy Thoughts,
Rick Butts
http://1Cat.biz - “How to Monetize Your Blog” free ebook…
Shameless, I know.
Kelson said on Tuesday, September 25, 2007
I’ve been taking the 2.3 upgrade as an excuse to experiment with themes and reevaluate plugins. I ended up dropping Sociable in this round. I’m not sure anyone ever clicked on any of the links. And I had a couple of others that were superseded by new core functionality.
I am still keeping WP-Cache installed, though disabled, so that if I do get that hypothetical spike in traffic, I’ll be able to turn it on easily.
admin said on Tuesday, September 25, 2007
I knew that the sociable stand would be a bit controversial. Thing is, all you have to do is test it. Turn it off and see what happens… in most cases nothing.
You don’t see authority blogs or very popular sites with dozens of bookmarking links or icons. Some may have 1 or 2, but certainly not dozens. Nor did they get the traffic or the authority site ranking from having them!
IMHO, it looks very cheesy, but ultimately it’s a personal choice.
Rick, those who want to bookmark or tag this page will do so. I’m quite sure that whether or not I have a link to their preferred bookmarking site makes no difference (except to you
).
If you “really” wanted to bookmarking this post, I’m sure you would find a way to do so without those icons, lol!
Rick Butts said on Tuesday, September 25, 2007
Yes man, you are right - if I really made the effort.
I don’t want to be a fussy baby - just my thoughts on making things easy - and my personal belief that you can get a lot of progress by motivating the less informed.
It was astounding to see the responses to the survey when we started the magazine that 85% of the respondants were early level newbies - and very, very few people who knew what they were doing online.
My partner, who has been a webmaster for 12 years, has gotten a crash course in WordPress from me. He was completely ignorant about social bookmarking and until recently couldn’t have bookmarked a post to save his life.
When I showed him this post and told him about your great software - he asked me if we had the Auto-Social-Poster - and I had to tell him it has been running on http://1Cat.biz for months.
So, while big fancy blog sites may not use easy posting icons - they also make a lot of other fundamental marketing mistakes - and assuming they have all the links they need - or that their audience is well informed may be another one.
It’s nice to have an intelligent conversation on this with someone who is so skilled and knowledgeable about these things.
What really honks me off is the relentless launches that flood my email box with hyped out pressure to buy something no one has seen or had a chance to create an unbiased (non affiliate motivated) review.
Thanks for letting me share…
Rick Butts
Rick Butts said on Tuesday, September 25, 2007
Hey - I also want to tell you that this blog is very well done.
The flash (?) rotation of your products in the upper right hand corner with the fade in is gorgeous - eye-popping - and I am insanely jealous!
Rick
Claude Gelinas said on Tuesday, September 25, 2007
Thanks for the tips, Anthony!
For those whose still insist on using Sociable to display nifty (but largely useless) social bookmarking services, perhaps an alternative would be to stick with only the major services — it would instantly clean up much of the clutter.
Gobala Krishnan said on Tuesday, September 25, 2007
I just cleaned up all those things you mentioned. Its good to clean up once in a while, the more you throw away the more new stuff you can take in.
Semmy.name said on Wednesday, September 26, 2007
Cleaning out is a good thing. However, I keep the “share this” icon on the end of my post which is the minimal version of recommendation links (email, social networks), so I balance out but not cluttering up my blogs and still give people the ability to email and recommend.
Steven Henderson said on Wednesday, September 26, 2007
Is there a “Print this Post” button available in Word Press?
If so, might I suggest that you incorporate one in your blog?
You have some excellent ideas, that I’d like to follow up on - but I suffer from info-overload and need hard copy for TO_DO items.
I then check them off with a good old fashioned pen (or pencil) as I get round to implementing. Crude but it works!
I’ve found that using the browser print function unaided by any print frame pre-processing often gives unsatisfactory results for this chore. The ideal would be a frame of just the post - with its URL appended.
Steve
PulpFictionMafia.com
Kathleen said on Wednesday, October 3, 2007
Thanks for the Wordpress plug-in tips. Excellent, and glad to know when too much is just too much.
Nice blog!
Regards,
Kathleen
MarginsXs
Christy Mason said on Friday, October 5, 2007
Some interesting comments, although I’ve seen a significant amount of traffic from various social networking sites to my blog, although I can’t say for certain whether they are clicking on the social network icons below each blog entry…. anyway something to think about…
Thanks and keep up the good work
Cordobo » Get rid of useless badges said on Tuesday, November 27, 2007
[…] Get rid of useless badges “Get rid of those RIDICULOUS social media links at the bottom of every post. The only people who have the power to get any of your posts ranking well in Social Media Networks don’t need the little buttons to do it. If they think you’re worthy, they’ll submit regardless.” [via mass-automation] […]
Keith Lee said on Thursday, December 6, 2007
Thanks for the WP tips, wonderful.
You are right, we must know when is enough is enough.
I think I better start cleaning up my blogs.
Cheers,
Keith.