Most WordPress site owners have tested a ton of plugins over the years, and they usually sit on the plugins page of their dashboard, inactive.
Recently, one of our readers asked us whether these inactive plugins affect site speed and whether it is safe to click the delete button.
This is a question many WordPress users wonder, so this article will explore whether deactivated plugins affect WordPress performance and whether it is actually safe to delete them.
What are Deactivated or Inactive Plugins in WordPress?
The best thing about WordPress is that you can extend it using WordPress plugins. When you install a WordPress plugin , WordPress downloads the plugin files to your web hosting server.
In order to start using the plugin, you need to activate it.
You can install plugins and activate them later.
You can also deactivate plugins that you have tried but found not to be useful. You can view all installed plugins (both active and inactive) on the Plugins page in your WordPress admin area.
Active plugins are highlighted in blue, and inactive plugins have a Remove link underneath them.
Do inactive plugins slow down WordPress?
No, inactive or deactivated plugins do not slow down WordPress. To understand this, let’s look at how WordPress works behind the scenes .
Every time a user requests a page from your WordPress website, WordPress starts a loading process. During this process, it only loads active plugins installed on your website. All inactive plugins are completely ignored and not loaded or even viewed.
Even if you have dozens of inactive plugins installed on your WordPress site, they will not affect your site’s performance or slow it down.
WordPress only looks for inactive plugins on your site when it loads the Installed Plugins page in the WordPress admin area. Even then, it only looks for the header file for the plugin and never loads the plugin itself.
If your WordPress site is running slow, inactive plugins are definitely not the reason.
You may also want to check out our step by step guide to speed up WordPress and improve performance .
Should I delete inactive plugins in WordPress?
The reason WordPress allows you to deactivate plugins instead of just deleting them is that sometimes you might just want to turn off a plugin temporarily.
If you plan to use the plugin soon and are concerned that deleting it will erase its settings, then you should keep it.
Otherwise, there’s really no point in keeping inactive plugins installed on your website. In fact, they can sometimes cause a lot of problems.
For example, WordPress will still show you updates for plugins whether you use that plugin or not. This can be a bit annoying, especially if you have a lot of plugins installed on your site that are updated regularly.
Inactive plugins may be harmless, but they are still executable files. If hacked, these files can become infected or used to install malware on your website.
As a WordPress security precaution, you should remove any inactive plugins that you don’t intend to use. You can learn how to properly uninstall a WordPress plugin in our beginner’s guide .
Expert Guide to WordPress Plugins
We hope this article helped you answer your questions about deactivating WordPress plugins and deleting inactive plugins. You may also want to check out some other articles related to WordPress plugin best practices:
- What are WordPress plugins? How do they work?
- Beginner's Guide: How to Choose the Best WordPress Plugins
- How to Enable Automatic Updates for WordPress Plugins and Themes
- Is it safe to use outdated WordPress plugins? (Explained)
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