Make your Blog Faster – Analyse your Plugin Impact

Do you really know what impact all those plugins are having on your site?

As you strive to improve your blog, you add more content and often more plugins.

Plugins can add some amazing features, but usually you have no idea if it is slowing your site down.

By using the WordPress P3 Plugin Performance Analyser, you can see exactly what each plugin is doing.

P3 – WordPress Plugin Performance Profiler

I read about P3 Plugin last week and immediately added it to my blog.

I have been aiming to improve my site speed, and wanted something more concrete to analyse it.

I had been using Pingdom to check my site speed, but I had no idea what the plugins were really doing.

With P3 Plugin for WordPress, you can see in just a few minutes what is really going on.

So here is what you need to do….

1. Install the P3 Plugin

The first step is obviously to install the plugin.

Here is the link to the plugin or else just search for P3 in the plugin search bar.

Don’t worry about the plugin itself slowing your site down because you can turn it off or remove it after you are done!

2. Run an Analysis on your Plugins

There is not too much to do with this plugin apart from run an analysis.

To get to the plugin analysis either

• go to Tools > P3 Plugin Profiler
• go to Plugins > Look for P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler) > Scan Now

In the top left of the main screen you will see a Scan Now button.

1. Click Scan Now
2. Change the scan name if you wish  (you can look at them all later in the Scan History)
3. Click Auto Scan

3. Analyse the Scan Result

Here is an example from my blog before I removed some plugins.

In this results screen you can see the following about my plugins:-

• Total Installed Plugins (yes 23!!)
• Total Time Impact of Plugins (0.522 seconds) – of about 2-2.5 second  load time
• % Impact the plugins have (of the total load time)
• Sql Queries (handy if you know what to do with it!!)

Below that is a pie chart showing the percentage each plugin has on the load time.

My mouse is hovering on one of the two big ones – Triberr (the other is Optin Revolution – subscribe popup).

Detailed Breakdown

If you want to see this breakdown in an easier to read chart, go to the Detailed Breakdown chart (second tab across above the chart).

Here is what you will see instead.

Now the two slowest plugins (biggest bars in the chart – yellow and blue) are not actually taking a long time, but their benefit to me is minimal so I will remove them.

4. Rescan after plugin removal

I removed the two most time consuming plugins and rescanned the plugins.

I saved myself over 0.1 of a second. Amazing huh! (insert sarcasm here)

Ok, so it is a small amount of time, but it’s all relative right?

My site load time is 2-2.5 seconds so  – this is 5% improvement.

Still not impressed?

Google has done some tests on page load speed and found (they slowed their page to test the impact):

slowing down the search results page by 100 to 400 milliseconds has a measurable impact on the number of searches per user

My speed improvement was half a second or 500 milliseconds. So better than Google (although theirs was faster to begin with – but still good).

Summary

There are many ways to improve site speed, and analysing your Plugins is one of them and something we should do periodically.

A small time saving can greatly improve your user’s experience and keep them on our site longer OR get them to stay in the first place!

Add P3 Plugin to your WordPress site and see what is slowing you down.