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Managed WordPress Disallowed Plugins

One of the benefits of Managed WordPress is the management level we invest in maintaining a list of plugins that will have a detrimental effect on your site. This article will provide you with a list of plugins that we actively restrict use on our Managed WordPress platform. We will cover the most common reasons why a plugin will be added to this list.

Why Plugins are Disallowed

Duplicate Functionality
Performance Detractors
Security Vulnerabilities
SPAM Plugins

What Plugins Are Disallowed

Why Plugins are Disallowed

There are 4 main reasons why plugins may be disallowed. While a plugin may be disallowed for less common reasons, the primary 4 causes for blacklisting a plugin will be covered by this article. If you have additional questions or concerns, please contact us for assistance.

The main reasons a plugin may be blacklisted are as follows:

Duplicate Functionality
Performance Detractors
Security Vulnerabilities
SPAM Plugins

Duplicate Functionality

You will find that our concerns ultimately coincide with keeping your site fully functional. Managed WordPress is not a development platform and is designed around providing a highly optimized hosting experience with outstanding uptime, reliability, security, and performance.

For your website and the server's overall health, and to provide the most optimized hosting solution possible, plugins that duplicate services that we already provide and include with your Managed WordPress account may not be used.

Plugins that duplicate existing solutions can cause harm to your website. Multiple caching solutions can corrupt files required to view a site, over-compressing Javascript and CSS, or redundantly storing images preventing them from being updated.

Performance Detractors

Often plugins include functionality that may increase the server load at the time that the site is loaded. A high server load can prevent your site from being loaded quickly and can even cause site and server downtime. This can be done in many ways:

Loading and reviewing large amounts of your code with every load.
Over frequent database access.
Poor database optimization resulting in database stability and speed issues.

These are just a few examples and are not by any means a comprehensive list. To ensure that your site is served quickly and reliably, we must restrict the inefficient plugins.

Security Vulnerabilities

We take the security of your website very seriously. It is important to note that malicious third parties can potentially access software on your website.

Both SiteLock and CodeGuard are included with Managed WordPress, allowing you to scan your site for malware and restore when damage has been found. We also actively track many plugins with known vulnerabilities and prevent their installation and provide you with the most secure possible hosting experience.

A Known Vulnerability is when software has a documented method for circumventing your security, allowing anyone who wishes explicitly to target your site to do so with a simple internet search.

Plugins with known vulnerabilities are often targeted by campaigns to compromise every site they are installed on due to the likelihood of widespread success.

We do our best to actively maintain a list of plugins with known vulnerabilities and blacklist them accordingly to help you maintain a healthy and secure website.

SPAM Plugins

To ensure the best experience for you, we blacklist plugins that are known to send SPAM. Many plugins can send mail via a script, which can result in plugins that abuse this privilege.

Plugins that send spam to users can be detrimental to your domain, as it may become blacklisted or worse. It's important that sending email practices adhere to current SPAM laws.

Note: If you cannot use a plugin because of the way it maintains its email lists, you may wish to consider Constant Contact. Constant Contact allows you to easily maintain an email marketing campaign that adheres to all SPAM laws effectively and affordably.

What Plugins Are Disallowed

Here is a list of plugins that are disallowed on our Managed WordPress platform:

adminer
broken-link-checker
counterize
dbc-backup
dynamic-related-posts
ezpz-one-click-backup
file-commander
fuzzy-seo-booster
google-xml-sitemaps-with-multisite-support
gosquared-livestats
hc-custom-wp-admin-url
jr-referrer
pressbackup
repress
seo-alrp
simple-backup
simple-wordpress-backup
statpress-reloaded
statpress-visitors
stats
superslider
toolspack
track-that-stat
tweet-blender
visitor-stats-widget
vm-backups
vsf-simple-stats
wordpress-gzip-compression
wp-cache
wp-complete-backup
wp-database-optimizer
wpdbspringclean
wpengine-migrate
wp-time-machine

Note: This list is complete as of Sept 2021. Plugins may be added to the disallowed list at any time and without warning or notification. If a plugin meets any of the criteria outlined in this article, it is likely to be disallowed.

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