Plugins.

You interact with them every day.

Yet in most cases, you probably know them as that annoying puzzle piece or electrical outlet symbol when you can’t access something on the website, or an app won’t run.

What are these mysterious bits of our cyber life?

What role do they play in your business website and do you need them?

This month’s quick tip will cover everything you need to know about plugins and why your business website should use less of them.

What is a plugin?

Well, when we speak in terms of the digital space a plugin is quite simply a piece of software.

The role of which is to allow customization or additional features usually in apps or web browsers.

Certain types of content can only run with certain plugins installed on a given browser or computer.

A good example of this is Adobe Flash.

For many years this is been a standard plugin to run many types of video content, especially on web browsers.

Those symbols mentioned above usually indicate the absence of a required plugin for a website or piece of content.

This content can only run if the plugin is installed and allowed to run.

Why Run Less Plugins?

Okay, so plugins allow a wider variety of content to run why would I want to run fewer of these useful pieces of software on my business website?

Two main reasons.

First and foremost, each plugin that’s installed adds more code to your website.

This results in higher server and CPU usage slowing your website down.

Ultimately, the goal of your website is to facilitate transactions between your business and the customer.

The slower the website, the less business gets done.

Secondly, not all plugins work well together and sometimes it’s difficult to know which will mesh smoothly and which will be like oil and water getting in the way of each other and reducing functionality.

The fewer plugins that are used the less chance of conflict there will be.

It should also be noted that as browsers advance, the use of plug-ins has decreased significantly, making their inclusion in your website less important.

Between the:

• potential for slow down
• loss of functionality
• and browser advancements

these pieces of software designed to run a wider variety of content are less relevant and potentially detrimental to your business.

Some plugins are incredibly useful however, many are now superfluous.

That’s why it’s good business to run your corporate website with as few plugins as possible.

At Rycob we have a limited plugin guarantee.

So that you know every website designed by us uses as few plugins as possible. Keeping your website running at peak performance for as long as possible!