Plugins are extensions that adds specific features that improves the functionality of a website.
From doing simple tasks like creating contact forms, recording website stats, optimizing content SEO etc, having a plugin on your website allows your site to do things it ordianrily wouldn’t be able to do in its basic form.
Two days ago, I decided to delete my website plugins. It was a very hard decision but I had to take a stand. This is how it happened…
Last two nights, at exactly 9:15pm, I noticed that my site was out of connection.
Although i didn’t expect such outage. It looked completely unusual, so I decided to troubleshoot the issue.
Not long after I started troubleshooting the downtime, I realized the error was triggered by some plugins..
Before now, out of the over 50 plugins I installed on the website, only 19 of them were active. 31 were inactive plugins.
Those inactive plugins were plugins that had either been deactivated because they were useless or kept for future use.
Many times I’d wanted to delete some of these plugins but something kept telling me to leave them just in case i needed them again.
On this particular day, after troubleshooting the cause of the down time, I realized a lot of the unused plugins were slowing down the website.
Some of these plugins had not been updated in many years. Some were bloated and many of them had been abandoned by the developers.
Realizing this got me furious!
At the same time, the thought of searching through the directory for these plugins again (whenever i would want to use them in the future) made me reconsider the idea of deleting them.
After a while, I decided the future will take care of itself so i deleted the plugins. And doing this took some load off the site.
After I was done, I decided to share this story with you…
4 Business Lessons I Learned From Deleting My WordPress Plugins
Table of Contents
Deleting my WordPress plugins did not just leave me with a better and faster loading website. I learned some important lessons which i’ll share with you below…
The Future Can take Care of Itself
Truth be told, some of us are like me…
We worry more about the future, at the expense of the present. We spend more time over analysing things when what we should rather do is to evolve faster solutions.
Don’t get me wrong, you cannt micromanage your future.
In as much as you want to consider future outcomes before taking decisions that will shape your business, always remember that the things that matter today may not be important in the next few years.
Again, remember, you cannot really have it all figured out. Sometimes events will always happen that you’ll never be able to control.
So, to keep things in shape, you want to be very strategic in your decision making.
You want to understand the risk objectively then take important decisive decisions that will keep your business running today, having it in mind that if you do not florish today as a business, you may not really survive to see the future you’re waiting for.
Some things are not always as important
A lot of the things we think are really important to us or will be very important in the nearest future are not (and will never be) as important as they appear.
Most times, you never get to realize you can survive without something or find alternatives until you’re faced with a very tough decision to either cut off these things by force or perish with them…
And whenever you cut off these stuff, you find to your gretest amazements, that you could still survive.
You see, with the way the world is going, so many of us need to come to terms with the fact that some relationships, goals, activities etc have lost their value over time. And they are no longer important or as important as they used to be.
Knowing this will lead you to re-prioritizing your goals from time to time.
Sometimes, we neglect our priorities
So many times as entrepreneurs, we get lost in activities, forgetting the priorities.
I see this everyday. Lots of start ups and online businesses focusing on posting new content to drive traffic to their websites without auditing the impact of this traffic.
In other cases, so many startups are bothered about getting new clients that they neglect to build robust relationships with existing ones thus losing them in the pursuit of new clients.
Thing is, as a small business, it’s very easy to forget the big picture or neglect your priority when you get carried away by the small wins.
This is why it is always very important to audit your priorities from time to time.
You can survive most of the things that scare you
So many times, we become so familiar and comfortable with certain things that over time, we get to hold onto these things as if they are indispensable or our own survival completely depends n those things.
Sometimes, we hold on to things we’re so comfortable with, so much so that it becomes very difficult to try out new things or leave this comfort zone.
Thing is, very few things are realy really indispensable. In most cases, there are always alternatives in life. There are things you can always survive without them.
A clear example of this should be demonstrated in this Covid-19 induced lockdown across countries…
A lot of us never believed we could survive working from home, or not going out or doing the things we really would want to do but, we did survive. Notwithstanding some discomforts.
While running a business, you’ll have to be faced with the fear of the unknown. But, sometimes facing the unknown headlong is going to mark one of your best learning experiences.
Things are always going to happen around you. Some times, life events will show up to force you to re-prioritize the things that really matters to you.
Life will threaten you out of your comfort zone to face stark realities and changes you’ve always wanted to postpone. Life will force you, to delete some “old plugins”.
As usual, at such times, the choice will be yours… To adapt to the new reality or sink with the past you’ve always known.
But In the end, no matter what you choose, always remember that only those businesses who can adapt to the new normal will survive.
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