Glossary Terms

plugin audit

A plugin audit is a structured review of every plugin on a WordPress site, checking whether each one is still needed, actively maintained, free of known vulnerabilities, and not duplicating something another plugin or the theme already does. For each plugin you look at when it was last updated (a plugin untouched for 12 to 24 months gets riskier as WordPress and PHP move on), how responsive its support is, whether a little custom code could replace it, and whether two plugins are quietly doing the same job. On neglected sites this often clears out 20 to 40 percent of the plugins, and every one removed shrinks the attack surface, drops some page weight, and makes future updates simpler. It's a standard part of any full WordPress audit.