At WordPress.com, most plugins are compatible and work seamlessly to enhance your website. However, there are a few plugins that are not supported. This page serves as a comprehensive list of these unsupported plugins, along with the reasons why they may not be compatible with WordPress.com.
With a plugin-enabled plan, your website gains access to a vast array of plugins from the WordPress ecosystem, offering incredible functionality and superpowers for your site. However, it’s important to note that many of these plugins may already have identical or superior functionality available on WordPress.com. Installing additional plugins may not necessarily enhance your site’s performance or features, and in some cases, could even have a negative impact.
Please be aware that our decision to disallow certain plugins does not imply that they are all inherently bad. Our aim is to ensure a scalable and efficient hosting environment for all our customers. If you wish to install a plugin that is listed on this page, simply reach out to us, and we’ll be happy to help you find an alternative solution.
WordPress.com comes with its own powerful caching solution that is designed to scale globally without any need for additional intervention on your part. Therefore, installing another caching plugin is not recommended and may result in unintended consequences, such as site crashes or conflicts with the existing caching system.
Please be aware that the following plugins have been identified to potentially interfere with the existing caching system on your site:
If you’re concerned about data loss, rest assured that we create daily backups of your site. You can easily access these backups through Jetpack → Backups, allowing you to restore or download a backup of your site from a specific point in time.
Please note that the following plugins are not supported due to their potential negative impact on your site’s performance, such as excessive resource usage:
Please note: If you want to migrate a WordPress.com site to another site hosted at WordPress.com, see our Import options.
These plugins put a high strain on our servers due to the exorbitant number of SQL queries they create:
These plugins allow users to delete essential files or SQL data that often result in a broken website. If you wish to reset your site, delete a file, or run a query, please don’t hesitate to contact us for assistance.
Emails are an essential part of any website. However, there are some plugins that send spam emails that we cannot allow:
As an alternative, you may want to check out a third-party email solution such as Mailchimp or MailPoet. You can integrate MailChimp forms easily into your site.
We know it can be tempting to automatically import content from around the web using content scrapers. We’ve found that these sorts of plugins are not a good fit for sites hosted at WordPress.com. Not only do they place unnecessary loads on the infrastructure, but automated posting is also often seen as spam and is generally unwanted.
Other incompatible plugins that don’t fall into a particular category are listed below:
Some themes and plugins break due to incorrect usage of the ABSPATH variable in requiring files or writing into folders.
You may not use ABSPATH on our platform, as this points to the core WordPress folder, unless you are requiring a core file. Instead, you must use WP_CONTENT_DIR, which is defined on our system as /htdocs/wp-content. When requiring a file, it would look like:
require_once( WP_CONTENT_DIR . ‘/plugins/plugin-stuff/stuffs.php’ );
Otherwise, if on other hosting platforms WP_CONTENT_DIR wasn’t defined, it would default to:
ABSPATH . ‘wp-content‘
The ionCube Loader is a PHP module used to hide and obfuscate PHP code. Some plugins such as AliDropShip require this to be installed on your site’s server to function. At the present time, we do not run ionCube on our servers. As a result, any plugins that rely on it will not function on WordPress.com-hosted sites.
Looking for an alternative to the AliDropShip plugin? The WooCommerce Dropshipping extension supports importing products from AliExpress and is compatible with WordPress.com.
Some plugins, notably Convertkit, require a particular database character set, such as UTF-8. Sites on WordPress.com use Latin1 as a character set. If a plugin requires a different character set, please contact the developers for an alternative solution.
