Presslabs Banned Plugins

Plugins solve a lot of wants, but also bring a lot of don’ts. We’ve compiled a list of banned plugins and the reasons we do not recommend using them on the sites we host our Presslabs platform.

WordPress is so powerful because of the thousands of plugins and themes available out there. Unfortunately not all plugins are coded in the WordPress way and some of them can really harm a site, especially under high traffic conditions.

This is why we’ve put in place a list of banned plugins, which are not working on our platform for various reasons. Here’s the list of them, with some explanation about why we ban them and also a replacement recommendation.

Plugins that interfere with our built-in ones

Caching plugins

Missed schedules plugins

We already have a solution in place for posts missing their scheduled auto post time

  • Missed Scheduled
  • WP Missed Schedule Fix Failed Future Posts

Other built-in plugins

  • WordPress Gzip Compression - we already have gzip enabled on all servers.
  • CDN Linker - this is interfering with our built-in CDN .
  • Gitium - this is our own git management plugin that is already built-in.
  • WP Memcached Manager - This plugin hasn’t been tested with the latest 3 major releases of WordPress and stopped working in PHP 7, we provide our own built-in memcache management functionality.

Plugins affecting the site performance

For all related posts plugins we recommend using Outbrain , AddThis or ElasticPress .

Most visited posts plugins

These plugins usually write in the DB every page view for every post. You can imagine that this is not a very good practice for sites with hundreds of thousands of views (either per day, week or month). We have built for this the plugin Toplytics which pulls this data from your Google Analytics account and safely serves it as a configurable widget and we strongly recommend it as an alternative for all the plugins below.

Plugins doing dynamic requests at every click

This set of plugins is doing dynamic requests to WordPress’ backend breaking our caching mechanism and bringing sites down.

SQL heavy plugins

These plugins put a lot of pressure on the SQL, either by doing tons of useless queries, either by running giant queries which are clogging the database, or by writing huge options in the DB.

Other plugins affecting the site performance

  • Role Scoper - interfering with our caching mechanism
  • WP Media folder - This plugin is altering the uploads folder structure which is not recommended and is not working on our platform.
  • Database Browser - Interferes with our caching mechanism.

Plugins that interfere with our security policy

Database access plugins

Based on our security policy we don’t allow direct DB access in order to avoid possible exploits and hacks through DB queries. Here’s a list of banned plugins because of that.

Backup plugins

We have a very tight backup policy which enables backups on multiple layers and in different locations. Most backup plugins are not friendly with sites having a large DB or tens of GB of data in their uploads folder. You can request a Media Files backup or a database one from the Snapshots section of the Managed Hosting Dashboard. In case you want a custom backup of your site, please contact our support team .

Other plugins with security risks

  • GD Star Rating - this is known for vulnerabilities and we recommend switching to GD Rating System .
  • EWWW Image Optimizer - we block the exec function and we recommend ShortPixel Image Optimizer instead.
  • FileBrowser - plugin not updated in over 2 years
  • File Commander - removed from the WP repository
  • Watermark My Image - alters the charset of the post content
  • Auto Upload Images - This plugin has serious security vulnerabilities, allowing the upload and then execution of random php scripts.
  • Exec-PHP - This plugin hasn’t been updated in a very long time and its PHP execution inside posts and widgets feature can be a security threat. Use shortcodes instead.
  • Tevolution
  • Tevolution - Directory
  • Tevolution - LocationManager
  • Related Posts - removed from the WP repository.

Other plugins that are banned

Previous Presslabs backup policy
Next Presslabs Cache Specifications