How To Identify WordPress Plugins That Slow Down Your Site

When it comes to WordPress, there is a love/hate relationship that defines our use of what has to be the very best CMS/Blog platform that exists today.

Even though we all love how WordPress offers thousands upon thousands of plugins that can offer every type bell and whistle imaginable, all too often we find ourselves tempted to add just one more plugin to an ever growing assortment of plugins that eventually will slow our websites down to a crawl along with creating memory issues in our admin sections.

While some plugins can be used without tapping into your valuable memory resources and don’t require running lengthy scripts or make multiple resource calls, there are however some plugins that will not only slow down your front end page load times, but will also eat up so much memory in your admin section that you’ll start to notice Fatal Error messages related to Out of Memory issues, not to mention the dreaded White Screen of Death. While most developers will recommend placing the band-aid on the bullet wound by increasing your memory within the wp-config.php file and the php.ini, it is a much better idea to identify how much of a resource hog each plugin will become before you find yourself dependant upon it, and have to accept it’s downfalls.

One of the best ways to identify which plugins are going to cause you heartache and problems is to use, you guessed it, another plugin. But the big difference about this plugin is that it’s only activated and used when you need to identify the plugins that will slow down your site or eat up your resources. The name of this temporary utility is the Performance Profiler, or P3 for short made by a hosting company I don’t recommend, but I always end up going to them for purchasing domain names, Godaddy.

Amazingly enough Godaddy actually got this right, and the P3 plugin is well worth downloading and installing through the Add New Plugins section of your admin. Once installed, you can run a diagnostic that won’t affect the performance of the front end of your site while it runs, and afterward you’ll see a pie chart of which plugins are killing your site. Afterward you can simply deactivate the utility until you need it again (and again). Even though most people will run this utility on websites where their plugins are so deeply rooted into their overall functions that removing them is impossible, you can however use it to test any future plugins that you find yourself drawn to like a mosquito to a flame.

I do recommend that you run a diagnostic both before and after you activate any new plugins so you can determine whether or not the benefits will outweigh the costs resulting in the decline of both load times and memory resources.

About the Author

Samantha is a WordPress developer and SEO wordsmith that is currently devoted to promoting the satellite TV benefits of DISH deals and DISH channels at any and every opportunity.