Maximize performance when using WordPress plugins

WordPress has super scalability, which has helped it become the most commonly used content management system in the world. The concept of themes and plugins makes WordPress a very popular framework, and using WordPress makes it possible to have tens of thousands of themes and plugins available.

But according to Uncle Ben, with great power comes great responsibility. You can’t use multiple themes (in most cases), but you can use an unlimited number of plugins in a single WordPress installation. This may degrade performance - but not necessarily every time. In this tutorial, I’ll help you use WordPress plugins without giving up on performance.

Why WordPress is great

Let’s take a closer look at WordPress scalability.

WordPress was originally created in 2003 as a fork of another blogging software called “b2 Cafelog”. One year later, in version 1.2, released on May 22, 2004, the "plug-in" feature was introduced. About a year later, on February 17, 2005, version 1.5 was released with the theme system. (You can see the full history here if you'd like.)

In my opinion, these two versions are the biggest improvements in the history of WordPress. This is because, before these versions, the WordPress community had been made up of users, and in these versions, developers joined the community (some of those users became developers). If you want to create software that people around the world use (and develop), you're going to need a large developer community. ​​p>

WordPress has one of the largest developer communities in the open source ecosystem. The number is hard to pin down, so I can't give an exact number, but it's probably in the tens of thousands. These developers have created over a hundred thousand plugins and themes (combined).

Due to the large number of plugins and themes, more and more people are using WordPress and developing, which leads to more and more people joining the community...and this virtuous cycle is a quarter The reason for the website is powered by WordPress.

Will the plug-in affect performance?

Short answer: Yes and no. As with most short answers, this doesn't make much sense.

You cannot measure how many resources a plugin uses by counting it. The thing is, some plugins take up more system resources and some don't. I can install over a thousand plugins that don't slow down my site, or just install one plugin and completely destroy another.

This depends on several factors:

• Purpose:The purpose of the plug-in determines its performance cost. For example, a contact form shortcode plugin uses far fewer system resources than a plugin that helps you with SEO.
• Codebase: Not surprisingly, poorly coded plugins perform worse than well-coded plugins. That’s why using a framework like WordPress Plugin Boilerplate is a smart move.
• Environment: Unused system resources are not necessarily good. I mean, it's fine in rush hour traffic, but if you have a Tesla Model S, you're not going to limit your speed to 10km/h. If a plugin requires a bit of system resources to run, and you host your project on a powerful server, you don't have to give up the plugin as you would on a shared server.

How to choose and use plugins wisely

Now that we've covered why plugins may (or may not) slow down your site, it's time to look at how to prevent this from happening . I'll write down some of the things that come to mind, but please feel free to contribute to this section by suggesting your thoughts in the comments section.

Using the plug-in performance analyzer

Plugin Performance Profiler plugin (P3 for short) is perfect for you, measuring how much your plugins are slowing down your site one by one.

If you just want to quickly understand the plug-in resource usage, using this plug-in is very simple. After installing the plugin, simply go to the P3 Plugin Profiler page under the Tools menu and click Start Scan. If you select Automatic Scan, P3 will perform a quick scan by visiting several pages at random and monitoring how plugins affect page loading.

This is a great way to see which plugins are taking up system resources and which plugins don't have much impact.

Choose your plugins wisely

As I said before, poorly coded plugins perform worse than well-coded plugins. In our vast WordPress plugin ecosystem, most of the time, you will have more than one option to choose a plugin with the same functionality. If you know what a good codebase looks like, you should examine the code of the plugins you choose to use. (You can also benefit from P3’s reporting.)

Remember: Popular plug-ins are not necessarily the best plug-ins.

Migrate to a better server

Why are people angry that Google Chrome is so RAM-hogging? What I mean is, having more RAM available doesn't mean your computer will run faster. If your computer has 8 GB of RAM and Google Chrome uses 1 GB, this is because Google Chrome requires 1 GB for better performance.

The same goes for the server. If you have more system resources, you can use them for more things. If you don't need to use a powerful server, there's no point in using it. If you need a more powerful server to use more plugins, there's no point in trying to achieve speed on a shared server.

If you have the system resources, or if you have the resources to own the system resources, don't be shy about using the plugins you need.

in conclusion

You shouldn’t always be “I shouldn’t use more than (X) plugins” or “Using an SEO plugin will slow down my site, so I shouldn’t use it even if I need to”. You can use as many plugins as you need (or want), provided you choose your plugins and servers wisely.

What do you think about this? Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section below. If you like this tutorial, don't forget to share it with your friends!