Which WordPress Plugins Combine Many Plugins Into One?

One of the big benefits of WordPress, and one I've mentioned a lot on this blog, is that it's an extremely extensible platform. It does a ton of different things out of the box, but if you want to expand the functionality of your site, there are literally tens of thousands of plugins available.

But this leads to a problem: plugin bloat.

Fortunately, plugins are just chunks of code, and chunks of code can be stapled together to make something bigger and better. A bunch of plugins out there are, in fact, basically just large conglomerations of smaller plugins, and I wanted to talk about those today. So, let's get to it!

What is Plugin Bloat and Why Does It Matter?

Plugin bloat is what happens when you think "oh, this would be neat to have" for a functionality, add a plugin, and start to build parts of your site around it.

You end up with a customized and functional site. Great, right?

Sometimes, yes, it's fine. Sometimes, though, it adds up into a larger problem than you might expect.

Many plugins add database entries, scripts, stylesheets, or other assets. That alone isn't a huge problem, and when only one, three, eight, or some other low number of plugins are doing it, whatever. But the more plugins you add, the more these things inflate. You'll end up with dozens of database tables, scripts, and other bits of data that pile on and make things messy at best.

Many plugins store settings, create logs, add tables, and inflate your storage usage. I'm old enough to remember when your site could go down if too many people used it in too short a span, when bandwidth had monthly caps, and when your database tables were so small that you had to watch how many tags you put on a post. 

These days, storage isn't nearly so constrained, but it's still not a good idea to wildly inflate how much you're using. Cleaning it all up later can also be a huge hassle.

Plugins add entries in your admin dashboard and clutter your experience. I have test sites with under 20 plugins, and even with that few, it can be a pain to figure out which sub-sub-menu in the admin control panel hides the settings for the specific tool I want to change. When the average site has 20-30 plugins, and many larger sites have 50+, just finding the controls for any given feature can feel like an all-day project.

Front-facing plugins can delay site loading or even be render-blocking scripts. Admin-side plugins don't usually wreck your site speed, but front-facing plugins very much can. Even if your plugins are designed for speed originally, they can delay one another, they can fight for dominance, they can block rendering of certain elements or trigger large layout shifts on loading, and more. 

When getting a high PageSpeed score is a huge benefit, any plugin that gets in the way of that has to really earn its keep to be worth the hit.

Each additional plugin is a chance for conflicts between plugins. WordPress plugin developers test their plugins against new versions of WordPress, but that's all they're really required to do. Many of the better developers test for conflicts against the top popular plugins, maybe the top 20, 50, or 100 of them, too.

But, as I mentioned above, there are tens of thousands (nearly 100,000) plugins out there. With vibe coding, a lot of developers are making new plugins, too. How much possible testing could be done between plugins? How much institutional dev knowledge and best practices to avoid conflicts can be carried forward with vibe coding?

Anecdotally, I've been seeing a lot more conflicts between plugins, especially newer plugins, over the last couple of years. It's not always the ones you would expect, either.

Each additional plugin is a potential security hole, either on its own or in its interactions with other plugins. Plugins are third-party code you let run on your site. In any other circumstance, that sounds insane. Adding 20, 30, 50 of these? From developers you've never met, who you have no way to verify? It's kind of crazy that this is the normal state of things.

Plugins can be security holes, and I'm not just talking about issues with plugin code or its interactions with WordPress or other plugins. Some plugins can be vectors for DDoSing or spamming. Some can be gaps into your back end. 

And what happens if a plugin developer is compromised, and a malicious actor pushes malware in the plugin? You see an update in your dashboard, something routine enough that you have to do it nearly every day because of how many plugins you have. You update, not thinking twice, and now you have a backdoor, a keylogger, a spamware, or some other nonsense on your site.

Each additional plugin is an added maintenance burden. To keep your site and your plugins up to date, you really should be researching each one, learning how it affects your site, performing tests in a dev environment, and making sure that compatibility is truly 100%. That's fine if you have a dozen plugins, but if you have many more, it's an immense hassle. If you do need to roll something back, knowing how to find an older version of a WordPress plugin can save you in a pinch.

But you can't not do it, because leaving plugins out of date is also a risk.

That's why so many site owners just click "update" once a week and hope for the best, and it's why a lot get burned.

Whew! That's a lot. 

There are two main solutions to this problem. You can use fewer plugins, or you can try to find plugins that combine the features of two or more other plugins, and switch to the larger and more complex plugins.

Obviously, I'm talking about the latter here.

Plugins That Combine Plugins

I want to go over a bunch of good options for multi-function plugins, but first, I want to make a bit of a distinction here.

What I'm not talking about are generally large plugins.

Think of things like:

• AIOSEO or Yoast, which have a ton of SEO features, but are more just single large plugins than distinct collections.
• WP Rocket, which has a bunch of interrelated functions centered around site optimizations.
• Big developers like WPMUDEV or PublishPress, which offer dozens or more plugins under one license. These are still distinct, separate plugins.

My goal is to discuss plugins that are designed to take a bunch of disparate, disconnected features, things that aren't really interconnected, and mush them together into one big plugin.

What you'll find is that a lot of these are taking small "unitasker" plugins and mixing them together. These are the equivalents of code snippets in the functions.php file, not larger and more elaborate tools. But, rather than having 20 different code snippets to manage, you can roll them together into one.

So, what are your options?

Option 1: Levers

Levers is my favorite solution to the plugin pile. It has 60+ different micro-features, things you would normally have a small plugin to manage, all combined into one.

To give you an idea of what's included, it has features like:

• Setting and managing your site favicon.
• Hiding the "uncategorized" blog category.
• Republishing scheduled posts that miss their schedule and end up unpublished.
• Setting the copyright year to be dynamic instead of an annual maintenance task.
• Automatically rewriting character sets, like changing the em-dash into a hyphen or removing artifacts from pasting from third-party apps.
• Fixing the XML-RPC security hole.
• Disabling directory-based browsing to hide site data from info-stealers.
• Automatically redirecting attachment pages to their parent posts.
• Obfuscating email addresses on pages to avoid data scrapers.
• Purging expired session tables to keep commerce bloat low.

Personally, when I installed Levers, I was able to remove a full 15 plugins from my site because it replaced them. 

It's also really easy to install. You download the plugin, unzip it in the plugins folder, and activate it. Then you just go down the list and enable/disable whichever levers you want to have active. A few need a bit of configuration, but most don't.

Personally, I would recommend starting by making a list of the plugins you have installed, what features they're being used for, and whether or not they can be replaced. If more than five or so can be replaced by Levers, I'd use it. 

Obviously, not every plugin you use is going to be replaced here, and that's fine. I still have plenty of plugins active, many of which are much larger and more complex than any individual feature of Levers. But, even being able to nuke 15 or so individual single-function plugins is a huge boon.

Did I mention it's free? It's free. 

Option 2: Perfmatters

Perfmatters is similar to Levers in a lot of ways, but it's a bit more narrowly focused. It's aimed squarely at site speed, lightweight code, and streamlining functionality. It's the same sort of dashboard with buttons to enable or disable functions, but those functions are more focused.

A lot of the preferences are similar, things like:

• Changing the autosave interval for posts.
• Disabling the heartbeat API.
• Disabling blog comments or removing the author URL field.
• Disabling the REST API if you don't use it.
• Disabling RSS feeds if you don't need it.
• Removing the jQuery Migrate function.

Perfmatters does have one major difference, which is a script manager. The script manager scans your site for the scripts being loaded on your site by plugin, and allows you to selectively disable individual scripts, and even control which pages they run on. For example, you can tell your social sharing plugin not to run on pages you don't need it to, or disable contact forms on pages where a contact form isn't necessary.

This is all a lot more complex and a more advanced feature. It's very, very useful if you know what you're doing, but it's also easy to disable a key script on a key page and shoot yourself in the foot, so be careful with it.

Another thing Perfmatters brings to the table is a bunch of database cleanup tasks you can schedule and automate. You can click a single optimize button to clean up things like trashed comments and autosave drafts, or you can schedule those tasks to be handled routinely in the background.

If there's any downside to Perfmatters, it's that it isn't free. A single site license is $30 per year, which is still really minimal, but that's more than zero. You're also looking at $125 annually if you're like me and want an unlimited site license for your agency clients. 

Option 3: ASE

ASE is Admin and Site Enhancements, a plugin suite that is also similar to Levers, but if anything, larger.

It has a total of 76 different modules across categories, including:

• Content management, like easily switching post types, reordering content, and controlling media file visibility.
• Admin interface optimizations, like managing custom elements for the admin bar, hiding admin notices, or changing your dashboard logo for internal branding.
• Login and Logout tweaks, like changing your login page URL, customizing the login page, and managing disabled user accounts.
• Custom code management with a snippets manager, custom CSS, and adding code directly to the head, footer, and body instead of functions.php.
• Component disabling, like turning off comments, disabling Gutenberg editing, disabling the REST API, and disabling feeds.
• Security features, like limiting login attempts, adding captchas, and adding MFA.
• Site optimizations, including revision control and heartbeat control.
• Utility features, including backup and migration features, a form builder, and a redirect manager.

If anything, I think ASE maybe steps a tiny bit too far into the multi-function single plugin territory with a few of those features, especially the utilities. But it's full of so many specific functional modules that it's impossible not to mention it.

Now, I did say that they have 76 modules, but only around 50 of them are available with the free plugin, and a handful more are free but with some features gated behind their pro version. The pro version costs $40 per year for one site and scales up from there, with no unlimited site license.

One thing I like about their pricing is that they do offer lifetime licenses, $100 for one site. If you try it and like it and know you're going to keep it around, that makes some sense, as long as you aren't pushing the budget to do it.

Option 4: WP Extended

The last option I wanted to talk about today is WP Extended. WP Extended is, obviously, similar to the rest of the entries on this list. It's a little smaller, with just about 40 modules, and a lot of them are the same core features. Almost like we all need the same things, right?

One nice feature is a folder manager for your site media library. This is super handy for keeping track of everything when you're doing a lot of posts where media should be grouped up. For the most part, though, everything WP Extended offers is also offered by at least ASE and Levers, and likely Perfmatters too.

WP Extended is also free with a paid upgrade, and their paid upgrade is also $30 per year for a single-site license, or $100 for a lifetime single-site license. Unlike ASE, they offer unlimited site licenses at $200 per year or $500 for a lifetime license.

I will say, when I was working on this post, I did run into their site being stuck in maintenance mode for quite a while. I don't know that I'd super hold that against them, but it did make it a little harder to cover them. They're back now, at least.

So, there are my choices. I know there are probably others out there, so let me know if you have a favorite that offers unique features that the others don't.

Tell me, how many plugins would you save with one of these?