Field notes · 2026-05-03
The thing about plugins.
A short observation, on the difference between a tool you reach for and a habit you've stopped noticing.
Audited a WordPress site this morning. Twenty-seven plugins active. Of those, the owner could explain what twelve of them did. Of those twelve, four hadn't been used in over a year. Of those four, two had been deactivated and reactivated three times because someone kept "checking if they still mattered."
A tool is something you reach for to do a specific job. A habit is something you stopped noticing was there. By the time a WordPress site has twenty-seven plugins, most of them are habits, and almost none of them are tools.
The cost is not the plugins themselves. The cost is the cognitive debt of trying to reason about a system where every interaction might be one of twenty-seven things — without knowing which.
The fix isn't "use fewer plugins." The fix is "use a stack that doesn't need plugins for table-stakes things." Image optimization is a build pipeline, not a plugin. Caching is a CDN, not a plugin. A contact form is twelve lines of HTML and a serverless function, not a plugin.
Plugins should feel rare. When they don't, the architecture is the problem.
Michael
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Last updated 2026-05-03.