Performance vs. Bling – Don’t Over Plug-in Your WordPress Blog

A little while back, I had a nice little traffic spike. FFA jumped from an average of 4000 daily visitors to 12,000 visitors on this day. While most would welcome the traffic bump, I experienced a few 500 and 503 errors. When the site was up, it was crawling. I watched my bounce rate climb to almost 25%…not good.

I learned a few lessons on this day. My site wasn’t optimized and ready for the traffic surge. I love stuff like mobile apps, widgets, add-ons and plugins and realized my WordPress plugins had gotten a little out of control. I had 21 active WordPress Plugins, most of which were not vital to the site. I wanted to share the actions I took to speed up the site and the results.

The Fix

To speed up my site and help bring the bounce rate down, here’s what I did.

1. Increased my WordPress Memory limits, using these steps.

2. Took a close look at all my WordPress Plugins that were hogging my resources.

3. Disabled a dozen WordPress Plugins, including Intense Debate, WP Drag2Share Extended, Tweetback, Twitme, etc.

Basically, I got rid of the unnecessary bells and whistles to improve the overall performance and loading time of the site.

Results

The bounce rate went from 24.19% with 3.22 pages per visit and an average of 59 seconds on the site to 2.90% with 5.31 pages per visit and an average of 1 minute and 40 seconds on the site.

I recommended taking a closer look at your site and trying to see it from a visitors perspective. Though I hated to see a few plugins go, I don’t really miss them as much as I thought I would. Readers are spending more time on the site and viewing more pages.