WordPress Plugins and Site Speed

No one likes a slow website. Have you ever wondered if the plugins you use in WordPress affect your site’s load time? Recently I began a quest to reduce my page load time significantly by making changes and checking the results with Google Webmaster Tools and Pingdom Tools. Here’s what I discovered about the plugins I used here at Organized Themes.

At first my page load time was way too long–averaging 8 seconds. According to Google, that put me in the bottom 20% of websites in terms of load time. Yikes! I didn’t realize that my site was loading that slowly, since my own visits were quick due to the browser’s cache of my site’s content. To get a better look at what was loading on my site, I used an online tool from Pingdom that measures how every element in your site loads. It’s similar to the developer’s tools in Chrome or Safari, but it doesn’t rely on your internet speed to determine the times (think improved consistency).

Pingdom Tools Chart

Pingdom Tools shows you a chart listing every element, its load time, plus its size. What I discovered shocked me. First of all, I use Download Monitor to keep track of the downloads of my themes and it works well for me. I noticed that it has a few graphics that are loaded via it’s css file–and they were taking around 2 seconds a piece to load! Also the javascript and images from Sexy Bookmarks social media links were also taking around 2 seconds to load. I removed the bookmarks plugin and edited out the graphics (that I wasn’t using anyway) from the Download Monitor and suddenly my site was loading in the 6 second range.

The next thing I noticed was the plugin that I use to properly display code snippets loaded a high number of javascript files to handle each possible type of code. While that added a lot of flexibility to the plugin, it slowed the loading of my site because a browser can only load two to four items from any one server at a time. Since I only needed to display XML, CSS and PHP, these other files were unnecessarily slowing me down. I edited the plugin and removed the extra code types and made my site faster again.

My advice for you:

Know what your plugins load. I’m not saying you should avoid plugins, but you should be aware of what they are doing to your site. You can compare the results from Pingdom Tools to your plugin list to determine which ones are slowing you down. You can then decide to either edit the plugin, find a faster alternate, deactivate it, or leave it alone.

Deactivate unused or unnecessary plugins. Many plugins load files even if they are not being used at that moment. Did you at one time use a slideshow that you’re not using anymore? Deactivate it. It will not only make your site potentially load faser, it will free up server resources for the plugins you do need.

Consider integrating some functions into your theme. If you know your way around WordPress, you can include your plugins directly into your theme. One advantage of doing it this way is you can combine your CSS and javascript which will result in fewer server requests. This is what I’m ultimately going to do to replace Sexy Bookmarks on this site.

These are simply options for you to consider. The plugin functionality is one of the best features of WordPress. Just be aware of what effect the plugins you use have on your site. In my next post I’ll explain how changes I made to my theme and using a plugin decreased my page load time to under 2 seconds. If you’ve found a speed secret share it in the comments below.