An Agency Perspective

If we build or manage WordPress sites for clients, we eventually hit a wall with plugin fatigue. The constant upsells, add-ons, UI takeovers, and never-ending subscriptions wear us down, waste time, and confuse clients.

In this post, we share what came up in a recent <a href="https://manananomas.com/agency-fresh-perspective/">Agency Action Show</a> conversation with Toby Cryns and Kurt von Ahnen from Mañana No Mas. We walk through the plugins that drive us crazy, what plugin fatigue looks like inside a real agency, how we handle SEO tools, WooCommerce, marketing channels like LinkedIn, and why serious security plans are not optional anymore.

This is written for agency owners and freelancers who want saner, more profitable WordPress practices.

The Plugins That Make Agency Owners Cringe

Toby opened with a simple question: if we could delete one plugin from existence, what would it be?

The answer was not about bad code. It was about bad experiences.

MonsterInsights: Great Data, Exhausting Upsells

We use MonsterInsights on many client sites. It connects Google Analytics, gives decent reports, and does the job.

The problem is the constant backend pitching. Every time we visit its admin screen, we get hammered with upgrade prompts, banners, and “unlock this feature” messages. On a personal site, this is annoying. On dozens of client sites, it becomes noise we have to wade through every week.

From an agency point of view, that noise:

• Slows down our work
• Confuses clients who think they “need” every upsell
• Makes the admin feel less like WordPress and more like an ad platform

The plugin works, but the experience is tiring.

All in One SEO On Complex Sites

Kurt shared ongoing problems with All in One SEO on more advanced sites, especially those with:

• Learning management systems (LMS)
• Active CRMs
• Dynamic content

On several large projects, All in One SEO felt like it took over the database, changed structures, and created compatibility headaches. On simple marketing brochure sites, it may be fine, but on complex, dynamic builds it has been a nightmare.

Be careful on complex sites.

UI Takeover Plugins

Another class of plugin triggers fatigue: tools that replace the familiar WordPress admin with their own UI.

Examples we have seen:

• A scheduling plugin like “Really Simple Scheduling” that loads its own full-screen interface with a mascot and custom navigation, so it feels like we left the site.
• Some event or calendar plugins that make us feel like we are inside a totally different product rather than WordPress.
• Form plugins that do not blend in with the standard UI at all.

By contrast, Gravity Forms adds a lot of power while still feeling like part of WordPress. WPForms, on the other hand, often feels like stepping into another application.

Every time a plugin invents its own visual universe, it adds:

• Extra learning curve for us and our team
• Extra training overhead for clients
• Extra friction when we are moving fast on production work

“Why Are You Deactivating?” Interrogations

One more experience that drains energy: plugins that refuse to deactivate until we answer a survey about why we are removing them.

We understand why product teams want feedback. The problem is how it is done.

We see patterns like:

1. Forced-choice checkboxes that do not match reality:
   • “Did not work as expected.”
   • “Missing a feature.”
   • “Found a better plugin.”
2. No option for:
   • “Goal completed”
   • “This was for a one-off project.”
3. Deactivation is blocked until we pick an inaccurate reason.

Sometimes we literally have to lie just to remove a plugin. That is the opposite of good UX.

A smarter approach would be to ask for feedback while we are using the plugin. For example, if we click five times to find a button, ask “Was this hard to find?” at that moment. Do not interrupt us when we are cleaning house.

What Plugin Fatigue Looks Like Inside An Agency

Plugin fatigue is not just “too many plugins.” It is the feeling that WordPress work is turning into plugin management instead of problem-solving.

Studies like Liquid Web’s WordPress hosting plugin study on plugin fatigue point out that the issue is usually poor plugin choices and management, not WordPress itself. As agencies, we feel this in a few specific ways.

Are you close to plugin burnout?

Add-on Explosion And Cluttered Dashboards

A common pattern:

• There is a core plugin in the WordPress repository, usually free.
• Every useful feature is split into a separate add-on, often paid.
• We end up with:
  • The main plugin
  • 5 to 10 add-ons
  • A plugin screen that looks like a wall of almost identical names

Form plugins are famous for this:

• Simple contact form: included
• Connect to Mailchimp: paid add-on
• Connect to SMTP: another add-on
• Conditional logic or uploads: more add-ons

This fractures functionality, adds update risk, and makes audits harder.

That is why many of us like how WPMU DEV handles things. If we pay for their plugin suite, we get every feature in that product, without a constant stream of “upgrade this module.”

Subscription Overload And Dark Patterns

SEO tools are a good example of subscription creep.

With Yoast, we see:

• Constant prompts to use their AI writing service, even when we already pay for tools like ChatGPT.
• Basic features locked behind paid tiers that other plugins include at no extra cost.
• Bundled upsells that push us toward a monthly subscription for things we do not need.

Rank Math is often more generous in the free tier, but once we dig deeper, we hit similar “pay to unlock” walls.

We see the same pattern in:

• Form tools
• Analytics
• Marketing integrations

It feels similar to modern cars that ship with heated seats but make us pay a monthly fee to turn them on. Or TV, where we ditched cable and now juggle Netflix, Disney, Amazon, and more to get the same content we used to have in one place.

A Rocket.net article on how many WordPress plugins is too much notes that most sites run 20 to 30 plugins. For agencies running complex builds, the issue is less the number and more how many of those are “core plus ten add-ons” with subscriptions attached.

We are not just tired of plugins. We are tired of plugin business models.

WooCommerce: When Your Store Runs On Stacks Of Plugins

If there is a single product that embodies plugin fatigue, it is WooCommerce.

WooCommerce Rarely Travels Alone

On a basic store, we might see:

• WooCommerce core
• Payment gateway plugins
• Shipping plugins
• Tax plugins

On an LMS-driven or membership project, we often see:

• WooCommerce core
• LifterLMS integration for WooCommerce
• WooCommerce Subscriptions or similar for recurring billing

That is already three, before we add coupons, bundles, or custom checkout flows.

We often watch people run away from WooCommerce toward a “shortcart” style SaaS platform, then run back again because they want to be self-hosted and within WordPress. Each direction comes with a pile of new tools, UIs, and costs.

WooCommerce often acts like it has ten jobs, not one.

From an agency’s view, WooCommerce should focus on secure, reliable transactions. Yet we still see issues.

When Transactions Go Wrong

Toby shared a client story where WooCommerce was being hammered by bad PayPal transactions. Fraud attempts were slipping through and causing real damage.

His advice to that client was blunt: he no longer trusted WooCommerce alone for that use case and recommended moving to Shopify, whose core job is secure commerce with simpler surrounding choices.

On top of WooCommerce’s own extensions, there is a whole third-party marketplace of add-ons. Many are built by solid teams with good intentions. The result for new store owners, though, is a confusing and sometimes fragile stack.

For agencies, WooCommerce is powerful but not a friendly environment for beginners, and a common source of fatigue.

Choosing SEO Plugins Without Losing Our Minds

SEO plugins used to feel like a big decision. Over time, many of us discovered something simple.

Most major SEO plugins do almost the same things.

They all tend to:

• Rewrite title tags and meta descriptions
• Generate XML sitemaps
• Add schema markup helpers
• Provide content scoring suggestions

That parity makes SEO tools very different from security tools like Wordfence or MalCare, which have different approaches and research models.

What We Actually Use

Across different agencies, we see patterns like:

• Rank Math
  • Chosen because an in-house SEO specialist prefers it
  • Many features in the free version
  • Fewer “AI” upsell nags than some competitors
• WPMU DEV SEO plugin
  • Simpler and more “all-in-one”
  • Fewer ads and distractions
  • Good fit when we want stability and clarity
• Yoast SEO
  • Installed on many legacy sites
  • Often adopted when migrating from All-in-One SEO
  • Heavy on upsells and AI pushes
  • Criticized by some SEOs, but still widely used

Kurt mentioned adopting many clients who were already on Yoast, and moving some away from All in One SEO due to issues on complex builds. He is considering further changes but defers to a specialist on his team.

Given how similar these plugins are at a core level, we often choose based on:

• Performance
• Cost
• Upsell annoyance level
• Fit with our existing processes

How Much SEO Work Really Takes

Tools are the easy part. The grind is the work.

On the Mañana No Mas side, we now devote roughly:

• About 10% of our effort is to SEO
• About 20 to 30% of sales
• The rest to the client delivery

As part of an SEO push for this year, we ramped up:

• Blog content
• Video production
• Transcripts and summaries of videos
• Repurposing video into written content
• Deeper keyword research
• Systematic internal and external linking

We also went back through older content to add internal links that connect related posts and services. This was a missing piece in our earlier work.

On Toby’s side, his team has invested an estimated 2,000 hours into SEO for his agency site over the last couple of years. Traffic and impressions are way up. Conversions, however, have stayed flat.

That gap shifted the focus from “get more traffic” to conversion optimization:

• Clearer offers
• Better calls to action
• Specific lead magnets
• Stronger landing pages

AI is part of that process now. Kurt has been using AI to scan batches of URLs, look for content gaps and revenue opportunities, then generate a list of ideas for new lead magnets and conversion tools. Some suggestions are worthless, but some spark real projects. Over two weeks, he spent about six full days building out those assets.

At the same time, changes in Google Search Console complicate our metrics. Around mid-September, Google limited many API-driven tools to the top 10 results, not 100. This caused impressions to drop sharply on paper, while clicks stayed steady. Add in crawling from bots and large language models, and numbers get even fuzzier.

The lesson is simple: traffic alone does not tell the story. We need to connect SEO work to real leads and revenue.

For more context on how plugin sprawl ties into performance and productivity, the article on plugin fatigue and performance impact is worth a read.

Marketing Beyond Plugins: LinkedIn, Facebook, And Lead Quality

Plugins are only one part of agency marketing. Much of the real work happens off-site.

LinkedIn’s Double-Edged Sword

Both Toby and Kurt are heavily active on LinkedIn.

Toby has leaned into:

• Webinars
• Educational posts
• Regular engagement with agency owners and potential clients

Kurt set a goal of reaching 10,000 connections, and did it the hard way, with real conversations and organic relationship building.

Then he hit a wall.

With 10,000+ connections came:

• A flood of spam DMs
• Time spent deleting pitches instead of talking to real prospects
• The need to prune connections and rebuild with higher-quality contacts

At the same time, his move from California to Kansas reshaped his channels. In California, most of his network had moved away from Facebook. In Kansas, Facebook is still heavily used by local business owners. So he had to dust off his Facebook presence and add that back into the weekly routine.

Growing a channel always leads to a second job: moderating and managing that channel.

Toby also tried outsourcing some LinkedIn outreach to a service at around $500 per month. The strategy made sense, but the results did not justify the cost. Hiring a full-time person to handle LinkedIn brought its own challenges in management and training.

Both experiences led to a similar conclusion. LinkedIn can be powerful, but we still need:

• Clear processes
• Modest expectations
• Sometimes, a lower-skill VA with very specific tasks, rather than a big-ticket “done for you” service

Grow channels, but moderate them.

When SEO Brings The Wrong Leads

Good SEO brings more traffic. That does not always mean better leads.

As impressions rose, Toby’s team started getting many calls from people who:

• Needed serious WordPress help
• Had budgets of around $100

Those calls have real people behind them, but they are not a match for an established agency.

We see a similar pattern at entrepreneur meetups. New founders are told they need:

• Full eCommerce
• Community features
• Appointment booking
• Membership
• All the automation

Often, they are making only a few thousand dollars a month, if that. The site they truly need is a simple, clear marketing site that supports sales efforts, not a giant system.

To handle this mismatch, Kurt often uses paid discovery:

• A small, fixed-price engagement to:
  • Audit site speed
  • Review SEO basics
  • Check current setup
• The cost can be credited to a larger engagement if the client moves forward.

Paid discovery:

• Filters out those who are not serious
• Gives real value to those who are
• Protects our time and margins

Simple SEO Wins That Still Matter

Not every SEO win needs a huge retainer.

Toby shared an example from a local business with a very small site. They had two big issues:

1. They did not control their Google Maps / Google Business Profile listing.
2. Their homepage SEO title was literally “About Us.”

In one short session, they:

• Started the process of claiming and verifying the Google profile
• Changed the homepage title to something that reflected their actual service and location

It took about 20 minutes of real work and put them “in the game” for local search. It is not magic, but without that, no amount of blog content would save them.

A quick 20-minute checklist for many small businesses looks like:

1. Claim and verify your Google Business Profile.
2. Set a clear, keyword-informed title on your homepage, not “Home” or “About Us.”
3. Check that each key page has one clear H1 that matches the page topic.
4. Add a simple, obvious call to action on the homepage.

For many small or local businesses, this kind of work is more valuable than a complex SEO package they cannot afford.

As agencies, we often give this sort of advice freely. It builds trust and helps people move from confusion to action.

Why Serious Security And Maintenance Plans Are Worth It

Security is a hard sell, even for smart clients. It sits in the same mental bucket as accessibility.

People want to talk about:

• Design
• Branding
• Animations
• “Sizzle”

They do not want to talk about:

• ARIA labels
• Backup schedules
• Brute force attacks

“Who Would Hack Us?”

We hear this a lot from small businesses:

“We are just a small local shop. Why would anyone hack us?”

The answer is simple. They are not attacking you, they are attacking WordPress and the web in general, with automated tools that do not care who you are.

Then one day, a local towing company or nonprofit gets hacked. The payment form points to a scam. The homepage is gone. The local community hears about it, and panic spreads.

It is much easier to write a small monthly check for real protection than to scramble later.

For a bit more background on how plugin overload and poor maintenance can hurt performance and security, the WPBuilds discussion on plugin fatigue adds another agency voice to the mix.

What Real Protection Looks Like

There are several layers to solid WordPress security:

• Hosting-level protections
  Firewalls, rate limiting, managed updates, and automatic backups.
• Specialized security plugins
  Tools like BlogVault, MalCare, or Wordfence that scan for malware, compare files to known-good versions, and help clean infections.
• Agency-level maintenance
  This is where we come in:
  • Regular backups and restore tests
  • Staging updates before pushing live
  • Quick action playbooks if something breaks
  • Ability to switch DNS or traffic to a clean environment while we fix issues

Recently, Kurt handled two hacked sites:

• One was a large nonprofit that he discovered while trying to make a donation.
• The other was a separate client with significant damage.

Each took about two full days of focused work to clean up. That is 16 to 20 hours, and in some cases more, especially when we need to track down lingering broken pieces after the main fix.

If we value that time at $200 per hour, the math is simple.

Scenario	What you get	Typical cost profile
Emergency hack cleanup	2 to 3 days of senior-level work, site disruption	One-time hit of several thousand dollars
Ongoing maintenance & security plan	Monitoring, updates, backups, cleanup included	Predictable monthly fee, far less than one emergency

A hacked site is always an emergency. It always arrives at the worst time. The client is always stressed. Trying to fix it cheaply only makes things worse.

Pricing, Boundaries, And Pro Bono Work

Because hacked-site cleanup is specialized and stressful, it is a premium service.

We need to:

• Charge a fair but firm rate
• Avoid slashing the price after quoting, since that suggests we were padding numbers
• Accept that some people will say no

If we want to help people who cannot afford that work, we can do what Toby and Kurt both do: choose pro bono projects on our own terms.

For example, stepping in to help a nonprofit repair a hacked donation page for free is a valid choice. It builds goodwill and keeps important community work going. That is separate from the pricing we use for paying clients.

The key is consistency. Once we pick a number, we stick to it. That clarity builds trust.

At Mañana No Mas, we still occasionally say, “This will be quick; we can handle it at no charge.” But those decisions rest on a foundation of solid pricing elsewhere.

Final Thoughts: Turning Plugin Fatigue Into A Strategy

Plugin fatigue is real for agencies. We feel it when:

• Analytics tools nag us endlessly to upgrade
• SEO tools take over databases or lock features behind add-ons
• WooCommerce stores require stacks of extensions
• Our plugin list fills with ten variations of the same tool
• Subscriptions multiply faster than revenue

The path forward is not to give up on WordPress. It is to be more intentional.

We can:

• Standardize our tech stack and avoid random plugins
• Prefer tools that respect the WordPress UI and our time
• Treat SEO plugins as commodities and focus our energy on content and conversions
• Use channels like LinkedIn and Facebook with a plan, not on autopilot
• Sell security and maintenance as real insurance, not a nice-to-have

If we run an agency or freelance practice, a useful next step is simple. Block one hour this week to review:

• Our current plugin list across key client sites
• Any overlapping tools doing the same job
• Our security and maintenance coverage
• Our biggest sources of low-quality leads

Then pick one concrete change. Remove a plugin, standardize on one SEO tool, start a basic maintenance plan, or refine our discovery process.

Our future selves, and our clients, will thank us for doing less reacting and more intentional building.