Do you know what effect a plugin has on your server response? The chart below compares the effect of the 12 most popular plugins ( measured by total downloads ) against a “vanilla” install.
Analysis
Some plugins can seriously impact the server response of your website.
- They do this for every single request to the website.
- Some of them adversely affect the performance even when not needed.
- Click on the chart labels to see the worst offenders.
- Now ask yourself if you really need the plugin.
Method used
- Configure oik-bwtrace to produce a daily trace summary. Deactivate other tracing.
- Using slog driver, run a series of 100 requests to the same URL, recording the output in a daily trace summary file called vanilla.
- For each of the top 12 plugins
- activate the plugin
- run the same requests, recording the output in the appropriately named daily trace summary file.
- deactivate the plugin
- Use slog compare to visualise the results.
The above figures were produced on 1st January 2021, with WordPress 5.8, PHP 8.0. The requested post contained "Top 12 perf test".