How to Create a Minimalist Wordpress Install

Having offered Sig Figs readers some thoughts on how to design a minimalist Wordpress theme last week, it occurred to me that there are other directories that one could delete (rename, to be on the safe side) and so have some fun with the layout and stucture of your Wordpress site.

My thoughts thus turned to Plugins.

However, there is a much better and safer way to get rid of plugins and that’s to use the Plugins tab in your Wordpress admin. Here’s the spin, run through that plugins page and Deactivate each plugin one by one and in a separate Firefox tab check out the results with a Control-F5 refresh of the page (or whatever the Mac/Linux equivalents are). If the results cause serious problems or throw up error messages simply go back to the plugins tab and reactivate the plugin. But, if you had no problems, try deactivating the next plugin, one after the other, checking as you go.

Of course, you might want some of your plugins, but how many of your readers or subscribers care about the “related links plugin” or the “share this” plugin, or whatever? Meanwhile, if you’re worried that deactivating any particular plugin might spew up lots of errors check out our post on the secret of php if and else that shows you how to circumvent this problem in most cases.

Anyway, if you’re blog is still functioning after disabling all those plugins, check your subscriber numbers after a couple of test days, and maybe see whether your page visits go up or down. If you see more subscribers, then stick with things as they are, it could be that visitors prefer the minimal plugins version of your site. If the numbers plummet (don’t blame me and don’t forget feedburner numbers always fall at weekends), then you could reactivate what you think were the more popular plugins and see whether the numbers rise or fall still further.

Sig Figs has about 20 active plugins and a couple of additional ones that I use only periodically for specific admin tasks. I’ll be deactivating one or two randomly over the next few days to see whether anyone notices. If no one baulks, then those plugins will be dropped permanently for the sake of speeding up your browser response times.

Please take heed - disabling plugins randomly could really screw up your site, so please, please, please backup first and don’t come crying to me if things go haywire.