{"id":9652,"date":"2017-11-07T13:48:08","date_gmt":"2017-11-07T11:48:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/themeisle.com\/blog\/?p=9652"},"modified":"2023-03-06T20:23:00","modified_gmt":"2023-03-06T20:23:00","slug":"plugins-affect-wordpress-performance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/themeisle.com\/blog\/plugins-affect-wordpress-performance\/","title":{"rendered":"Do Plugins Affect WordPress Performance? Real Test Data"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

“Too many plugins will slow your site down<\/em>“. If you’ve spent any time learning about WordPress, you’ve probably seen this statement. Is it true, though? And just how much do plugins affect WordPress performance?<\/strong> \ud83d\udcca\ud83d\udcca\ud83d\udcca<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

In general, there’s no hard cap on the number of plugins that you can run on your WordPress site. While that doesn’t mean you should go crazy installing every plugin in the WordPress.org repository, there’s no reason to believe that the simple act of installing “more<\/em>” WordPress plugins by itself <\/em>is bad for your site’s performance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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To help prove that point, we performed real-world tests on five commonly-used categories of WordPress plugins to determine how they affect load times.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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We then compared the load times to find out how much plugins affect performance across those various categories. Before get into the results though, let’s first break down the details on exactly how we conducted these performance tests. If that’s not interesting to you and you’re hungry for just the results, then feel free to skip straight ahead<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n

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How we conducted our performance tests<\/h2>\n\n\n
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Most WordPress websites use multiple plugins simultaneously.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n
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Testing a site’s performance is easy enough. You can use tools such as Pingdom<\/a> to run speed tests in seconds, although it’s best to repeat them a few times and find an average. For our test, we used a simple website with WordPress’ theme unit test data installed on it, to simulate a site with a decent amount of content.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This website is hosted on Flywheel<\/a>, which guarantees top performance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To start off, we tested how long the site itself took to load using Pingdom Tools. That gave us a baseline for our later comparisons. Then we installed plugins from five popular categories and re-tested our loading times to see what impact the plugins had. After each test, we restored our website to its initial state<\/a> to wipe the slate clean.<\/p>\n\n\n

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How five types of plugins affect WordPress performance \ud83d\udd0c<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

As we mentioned, we first tested our homepage’s base loading speed with Pingdom Tools. We used the San Jose, California server, and repeated the test three times to get an average. After all, results often vary quite a bit between instances.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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According to Pingdom Tools, our initial test site took 0.93 seconds to load<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\ud83d\ude4b\ud83c\udffb\u200d\u2642\ufe0f Let’s find out how much plugins affect WordPress performance!<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n