How to choose plugins to speed up WordPress?
More and more often I find myself talking to customers who don't know how to choose plugins to speed up their WordPress site created by themselves or by third parties.
They contact me asking to analyze and understand what are the bottlenecks that impact speed and make their WordPress site slow . Very often the problem is due to the installed plugins.
To enrich my blog with useful content and also give you the points of view of other professionals, I decided to interview Ivan Messina of SupportHost Italia who prepared Romania Phone Numbers
useful reports to concretely answer my questions.
Table of Contents
Can you have a fast website with lots of plugins installed?
What are the plugins that could usually be deleted or replaced?
Are Caching Plugins Really Important?
How to measure the real impact of a plugin on performance?
What are the main problems with page builders like Elementor?
Can you have a fast website with lots of plugins installed?
Absolutely yes. The number of plugins has no impact on the performance of the site. Their quality does.
Let’s take an example of two edge cases. Let’s take a site with 30-40 “site specific plugins” , that is, small plugins created specifically to provide specific functionality to a particular site. If these have been written by someone who knows how to write PHP, they will have a minimal impact on the site’s performance , despite their number. Also by virtue of the fact that they are small plugins and therefore the functions they perform are marginal.
Let's instead think about a plugin that needs to run several queries on the database to work, and maybe important queries. In addition, to display the data on the site it needs a style sheet and a JavaScript. This is the example of plugins to show related posts. At each page load these plugins check the entire database looking for related posts, and then they need a style sheet and a JavaScript to display them in an attractive way after the content of the post.
Aside from the fact that the recommendations are almost never optimal, these types of plugins tend to slow down the site and should be avoided, regardless of the size of the CSS and JS files they load into the page.
On our site we show related posts. However, we decided to use ACF plugins, handpick related posts for each article and then display them through a custom theme. This way the impact on performance is almost zero. In the end we use basic WordPress functions (custom fields) to store related posts and a few lines of CSS and JavaScript to display them (if present) at the end of the post.
What are the plugins that could usually be deleted or replaced?
There is no one answer to this question. Some have tried to make a list of plugins to avoid, but I wouldn't be that extreme.
When it comes to performance, you always look for a compromise.
If you need a feature and can't do without it, you'll have to leave that plugin active.
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