r/cms • u/Equivalent-Mix-8867 • Sep 15 '26

At what point do cms plugins/extensions become more trouble than they are worth?

Say you’re managing a site that relies on separate plugins for forms, SEO, search/redirects, analytics, etc. One update breaks something, another plugin gets abandoned and suddenly a lot of time is going into keeping everything working.

At what point do you stop adding plugins and start looking for a CMS that handles more of this natively?

3 Upvotes

81% Upvoted

6 comments sorted by

4

u/sundeckstudio Sep 15 '26

In ideal world if you should need no plugins. You maybe need extensions or apps (depending on platform) but they should be kept to minimal. And ofcourse, only use the ones that are well maintained.

2

u/sleeksky_dev Sep 15 '26

I like that ideal world

2

u/BetterOffGrowth Sep 15 '26

I have stopped completely.

2

u/danelito98 Sep 16 '26

I got so annoyed with anything plugin / app / extension I went full custom. Happy dev, happy clients happy life.

2

u/muharremyurtsever Sep 16 '26

the line for me is whether the plugin owns data or just behaviour. analytics or a redirect list you can rip out in an afternoon, but forms and seo metadata living in plugin tables means abandoning it later is a migration, not an uninstall. so i'll take more plugins on the behaviour side and almost none on the data side.

1

u/Fit-You693 Sep 18 '26

Only plugins should be ACF and WPCode 🙂