As WordPress continues to evolve and change, and your blogs grow as well, you may no longer use certain plugins, but forget to deactivate them and this could lead to a huge security issue down the road.
WordPress 2.3 and above has been great about letting you know when there are updates to certain plugins, but if you ignore this update message, or if there is no update notification, and you leave a plugin active, you could be opening your WordPress blog to being compromised.
Plugin authors don’t always think of everything when creating their plugin, and I would hate to see anyone have their blog be hacked due to a vulnerability in a plugin, so please, if you aren’t actively using and updating your plugins, remove them, as you will be closing potential security risks.
I know it is something not widely talked about in the community, but there is no reason to have four or five dozen plugins on your WordPress blog if you are only using three or four. I try to stay away from using extra plugins as much as possible, and I also steer away from any plugin that isn’t actively developed.
If you follow my advice, you will have taken another step to protect your blog, and in this day and age, that is never a bad thing.
I also highly recommend updating your blog to WordPress 2.3.1 if you haven’t already, and making sure you back up your blog both before and after the upgrade. If your blog is compromised, a working data backup can reduce the data loss.
