This Is Why You Should Delete All Unused Themes & Plugins

[GreyKnight]

My site not only have old themes, but old version of itself since years ago.
Let me delete those and see if it can improve my rank.

 

[maricelu]

This might have been only a coincidence, but i think it is worth testing.

 

[DamageX]

The amount of stupidity in this thread is painful...

 

[jascoken]

So many plugins and themes are doing constant http requests etc. Many will massively slow down the user experience - especially if you're not on premium hosting...

Why WOULD you keep any plugins or themes that you're not using? Strip 'em out!

 

[Deleted member 120847]

I have always done this at install, delete everything! all themes and plugins (be aware this will make your site unusable and you need to ftp in a theme) so I always know exactly what is going on.

This info from an SEO perspective is huge though! amazing find.

 

[lewisvivienne85]

Interesting!! will check soon.

 

[singingsleep]

I understand there might not be an OBVIOUS reason why themes would matter, but there's a lot we don't know about google and I can see reasoning behind this and would hesitate to dismiss it as "stupidity", especially when getting rid of that stuff is good practice anyway.

For one, a few people mentioned that the themes are getting pinged upon, hence update notifications etc. Secondly, someone else mentioned the possible security flaws in certain themes. There are some themes I wouldn't even upload once if I were trying to rank a site, and next time I make an authority site I am definitely going to research the theme I plan to use much deeper. I generally like to use a free theme that has good updates and support (hard to come by yeah). Recently I was building a site and was trying to tweak a theme which is very, very popular. In my research I ended up at the place where the theme creators submit their themes to WP for approval to the marketplace (sorry can't remember the proper name of it). The theme apparently had a large security flaw exploitable at one point and I mean these ppl put the creator thru HELL to fix it. And I mean these people are real assholes, think official adsense forum asshole level except wayyyy more anal. It wouldn't surprise me if themes that have historically had problems somehow find their way into G's algorithm in a negative way.

 

[Capo Dei Capi]

If you use webmatrix you can install wordpress and test out themes locally before putting a theme online to prevent even worrying about to many themes or plugins causing a slowdown, I learned it after spending hours messing with one of my site and causing several down times.

 

[dfguer]

The amount of stupidity in this thread is painful...

I doubt there a single discussion anywhere on any subject, with a whole lot of people participating, where that isn't true.

But, if you don't know enough yourself to know who's right and who's blowing smoke, and no one comes along to present an articulate, logical and believable explanation, you pretty much have to ignore the whole thing, after wasting your time and learning nothing.

 

[fatbap]

thanks, i'll look into this on my sites

 

[saadad]

It is coincidence or probably godaddy or hostgator deleted some heavy server loaders, and your site got up. But since u say u got flagged for hacking i think that maybe with deleting or deactivating stuff from your wordpress make you fix the hacking trouble.

But deleting unused themes and plugins only eat your disk space and do very little perfomrance on your server. If your on shared and mvoe to highly optimized VPS you will notice a huge difference. I think that nowdays any decent IM need to have highly optimized VPS or godaddy crap servers will cost him all the moeny and all the effort. I know i been there.