There are four main reasons why plugins may be disallowed. While a plugin may be disallowed for less common reasons, the primary causes for blacklisting a plugin will be covered here. If you have additional questions or concerns, please contact us via phone or
Live Chat for assistance. The main reasons a plugin may be blacklisted are as follows:
- Duplicate Functionality
- Performance Concerns
- Security Vulnerabilities
- SPAM Plugins
Duplicate Functionality
You will find that our concerns ultimately coincide with keeping your site fully functional. Our WordPress offering is not a development platform and is designed around providing a highly optimized hosting experience with outstanding uptime, reliability, security, and performance. For the overall health of both your website and the server and to provide the most optimized hosting solution possible, plugins that duplicate services that we already provide and include with your 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.
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 a number of 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. In order to ensure that your site is served quickly and reliably, we must restrict the use of inefficient plugins.
Security Vulnerabilities
We take the security of your website very seriously. It is important to note that software on your website can potentially be accessed by malicious third-parties. We actively track many plugins with known vulnerabilities and prevent their installation to help provide you with the most secure possible hosting experience.
Note: A Known Vulnerability is when software has a documented method for circumventing your security,allowing anyone who specifically wishes 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
In order to ensure the best experience for you, we blacklist plugins that are known to send SPAM. Many plugins are able to 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 is important that sending email adhere to current SPAM laws.
Which Plugins are Disallowed?
- adminer
- automatic-wordpress-backup
- broken-link-checker
- cache-images
- counterize
- dbc-backup
- dynamic-related-posts
- ezpz-one-click-backup
- file-commander
- firestats
- fuzzy-seo-booster
- google-xml-sitemaps-with-multisite-support
- gosquared-livestats
- hc-custom-wp-admin-url
- jr-referrer
- newstatpress
- no-revisions
- portable-phpmyadmin
- pressbackup
- repress
- seo-alrp
- similar-posts
- simple-backup
- simple-stats
- simple-wordpress-backup
- snapshot-backup
- statpress
- statpress-reloaded
- statpress-visitors
- stats
- superslider
- toolspack
- total-archive-by-fotan
- total-backup
- track-that-stat
- tweet-blender
- visitor-stats-widget
- vm-backups
- vsf-simple-stats
- wassup
- wordpress-backup
- wordpress-gzip-compression
- wp-cache
- wp-complete-backup
- wp-database-optimizer
- wpdbspringclean
- wpengine-migrate
- wp-engine-snapshot
- wpengine-snapshot
- wp-s3-backups
- wp-time-machine
- yet-another-featured-posts-plugin
