Determining Which Plugins Are Slowing Your Site Down

Dave Clements of DoItWithWP.com shared his experience with a plugin that’s new to me called P3 Plugin Performance Profiler. After performing an automatic scan on the WPTavern website, the profiler provided me a pie chart along with other metrics that allowed me to easily tell which plugins were capable of slowing the site down. Here are some of the metrics after running the scan on WPTavern.com:

The scan consisted of 15 random page visits. I have 25 Active Plugins. Those plugins accounted for 51% of the page load time. There was an average of 38 MySQL queries per visit. The plugin load time was 0.233 seconds per visit. Within this scan, Ajax Edit Comments was the slowest plugin out of the bunch at 21% and 0.0491 seconds while Yet Another Related Posts Plugin took second place with 17% and 0.0408 seconds. Meanwhile, Woopra consistently was within the top three for slowest performers.

P3 Profile Scan

After the scan is completed, you have a few different options of drilling into the data. The detailed breakdown tab will show you a bar chart that displays the worst offenders. There are other means of figuring out the data as well such as viewing the simple timeline tab or the advanced metrics tab.

Here are the advanced metrics for the scan I performed at 6 A.M. this morning.

At the time this scan was conducted, it took less than 1 second to load the entire website. Plugins only accounted for 0.2331 seconds on average. I’m sure I could figure out how to decrease that amount of time but when the numbers are this small, is it worth the trouble to shrink them anymore? Perhaps on a grand scale but for the average website? Also, what do you think of the number for “Number of plugin function calls: 4,835 average“. Does that seem like a lot to you?

I couldn’t help but notice the GoDaddy image at the bottom of the plugin screen. Sure enough, they were one of the contributors behind this plugin so I give them props for doing something legitimately cool with WordPress. I recommend running a number of auto scans during a 7 day period at different times of the day to get a good feel for which plugins are really the culprits for slowing down your site. After that, it’s your call on whether you want a faster website, or the functionality that the plugin provides.

Thanks Dave for the hat tip.