Ryan Imel on WPCandy is upset about people who are advising WordPress users against running a lot of plugins. He goes on a little rant, which you should read, because it definitely has a point.

What does matter is the nature of the plugins themselves. If the plugins are properly coded and serve their individual purposes well, then it shouldn’t matter even if you have one hundred of them active. If the plugins are big, bloated, and poorly written then you could run into a problem with only two active. The key here is the number of active plugins is unimportant; only the quality matters.

This is true, although I think you have a problem if you’re running 100 plugins, but that’s another matter.

The thing to take away here is that you can run how many plugins you want, just make sure they are well-written, then you won’t have any problems.

With that said, I still say you should keep your plugin count down. (more…)