What Happens When WordPress Is Updated With 100 Plugins Activated?

Over the years, there have been several articles published on the topic of how many WordPress plugins are too many. A common point of debate is that too many plugins can slow down your site or cause things to break. While the risk of things breaking exists, I don’t think it’s as bad as people make it out to be.

Longtime WordPress trainer, Bob Dunn, has published the results of his WordPress 4.0 update experiment. He set up two different sites each with 100 plugins installed and activated. One site used a Genesis child theme with several Genesis specific plugins. The other site used Canvas from WooThemes with WooCommerce and several WooCommerce extensions. Watch the following video to find out if WordPress and the server hosting it melts down.

https://vimeo.com/105450156

One thing I hope this video does is give users confidence in updating WordPress. The most common reason I’ve read for not updating is the fear of the site or plugins breaking. This video proves something I’ve been saying for years, it’s not the number of plugins you use, it’s the quality. As Mika Epstein astutely points out, it only takes one plugin to crash a WordPress site. Are you surprised by the results of the experiment?