“Fewer is better” is a term that is frequently heard for WordPress users in relation to plugins. There is some sense in keeping the choice of plugins for your site logical and minimalistic. However, it does not mean that you have to sacrifice functionality for the sake of simplicity, or choose between one feature or another simply to keep your plugin count to a minimum. What is important is streamlining your choice of plugins so that you have only one plugin to accomplish each task; not five. When re-evaluating your existing plugins, make sure that none of them have overlapping functions.
When it comes to load time, the quality of individual plugins is more important than the quantity of plugins being used. For instance, two well coded plugins that perform two simple tasks could be more efficient than a poorly coded plugin that combines the two tasks. This is not supposed to be a rule of thumb, but rather an insight into how some plugins work. Correct coding is more important to your site’s load time than how many plugins have been installed.
The plugins that slow down your website a lot usually do it by loading a lot of scripts on each page or by accessing the database too frequently. To avoid the CSS or java scripts from being loaded on each page, you can tweak the files so that they are loaded only where required. This can be accomplished by adding snippets to the theme’s function.php file. Similarly, for plugins that need to access the database, such as a social share count plugin, you can limit the number of times it accesses the database rather than every time the page loads.
Certain plugins are resource intensive but also necessary, such as Google Analytics or those used for social sharing. They slow down your site by sending requests to remote services and blocking the loading of other plugins while they are waiting for a response. This problem can be overcome by using asynchronous loading. This means that multiple plugins are loaded simultaneously. This way the page loads faster even when one of the plugins is trying to connect remotely to a service.
It is possible that if you have, say, 50 plugins running on your site, that 49 of them are ok, but there could be just one that is responsible for the site’s slow load time. If you think that your site’s slow load time could be because of a plugin, here’s how to figure out which one is responsible.
- Disable all plugins from wp-admin and then load the site.
- Now activate the plugins one at a time and load the site each time, noting the load time. This can help you narrow down the plugin or plugins causing your site to load slowly.
- Replace them with other plugins that offer the same functionality.
If this method seems too cumbersome and time consuming, you can use another WordPress plugin such as P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler) to help you locate the plugins that are slowing your site down. This plugin produces a report on plugin performance, as well as how much each plugin contributes to your site’s overall load time and the reason for this sluggishness.
In conclusion, always go for well coded plugins from reliable sources. Keep your plugins updated and regularly remove the ones that are outdated or unnecessary.