Installing a ton of plugins to make your WordPress blog more functional is very tempting, but if you add too many plugins, especially plugins that have been poorly coded or are out of date, it can have a detrimental effect on the user experience and can sometimes compromise the security of your blog.
Ideally a webpage should load within two seconds (test yours here, but don’t forget to come back), but this is near on impossible for many WordPress blogs on shared hosting, which is what many blog owners use.
The problem stems from the dynamic nature of WordPress and the often overcrowded shared hosting environment.
WordPress creates pages on the fly. This means the pages don’t actually exist on the server; they’re created when someone requests a page by clicking on a link on a WordPress powered blog or website. The standard version of WordPress queries the database a number of times to create a page. If there are lots of plugins installed that also have to query the database and output results, this adds additional strain on the servers ability to deliver pages quickly, and therefore decreases the speed a page can load.
Think of yourself driving through a tunnel. It’s very easy for you to get through it on your own, but if there are ten or twenty more cars trying to get through the tunnel at the same time it’s going to be a bit of a squeeze. This is what happens on a WordPress blog overcrowded with plugins; all of the data gets slowed down. It might only be for a few milliseconds, but those milliseconds count to people who give your site just a few seconds to impress.
The more plugins you have, the harder the server has to work and in turn the longer the blog visitor has to wait for the page to load. Couple this with an already busy server and you have a slow loading, user unfriendly blog.
What can you do about a slow loading WordPress blog?
- The first choice for many people is the WP Super Cache plugin. It creates static HTML versions of your dynamic pages. This massively reduces the numbers of queries made to the database and helps to increase page load time.
- Go through all of your plugins and deactivate the ones you don’t need. Be ruthless. Get rid of the vanity plugins first, but keep essential plugins such as Akismet. You definitely want to keep Akismet blocking comment spam.
- Make sure you are using the latest version of WordPress. These days you can automatically update from the admin area, but make sure you back up the blog database and files before you do.
- Make sure you are using the latest versions of the plugins you use.
- Speak to your webhost to see if they can make any changes to the configuration of the server. They probably won’t if your site is on shared hosting, but it’s still worth a try.
If you asked me to tell you the best number of plugins to use I couldn’t give you an answer. There are too many factors to consider. Top of the list is your hosting company; always choose the best you can afford. And don’t be afraid of looking into some of the smaller hosting companies as they often provide a better service than their larger counterparts.
Do you have any other suggestions for increasing the download speed of a slow loading WordPress blog? Please share them in the comments section.
Hi Stephen.
I arrived here because I searched ” plug ins make wordpress slow to load” and so I thankyou for mentioning the WP Supercache plug in which I shall go and add to my site.
I only noticed the “slowness” recently, at first putting it down to my own computor which sometimes goes slow slow stop :-). But then I thought about the possibility of the plugins being the culprits. (Trying to shift the blame helps me through my day LOL)
I’m glad to see you use CommentLuv and KeywordLuv too… I use them both so I know that these two plugins are not to blame. I’ve also got the facebook like button and tweetmeme and sexy bookmarks. Maybe these are the cause of slow loading times for my pages?
I guess I should test them out and deactivate them individually.
Anyway for now Ill go and try the supercache plug in.
Thanks
ps.. oh I was just going to post comment when I saw that twitter name addition below. Another plug in for me???? :-)
Karen
Hi Karen,
Thanks for dropping by and taking the time to leave a comment. I appreciate it.
It can be difficult to track down which plugins slow down a blog. The only real way is (like you say) to switch them off one by one and test. But even that isn’t fool-proof, especially if your blog is on a shared server.
A possible cause for slow blogs is the remnants of old plugins that have been installed and are no longer in use. Try deleting all plugins that are no longer active. There are a few plugins which will “clean up” your database, which may also help.
I have quite a few sites. Two of them have given me loads of headaches with regards to CPU usage and slow loading times. It got to the stage where the hosts would shut them down at least once a month and I beleieve that was due to plugins, as the traffic numbers were not exceptionally high. Anyway, after a few months of having to regularly “fix” things I decided to move and now have a VPS server and absolutely no issues with speed. A VPS is well worth the extra investment if you can afford it. I pay $38 per month from KnownHost – outstanding support (although I haven’t used it since they moved everything over for me and configured the server).
I checked your site BTW and it was fast for me. Did you install the WP Cache plugin?
The Twitter plugin is called TwitterLink.
Reguarding the loading of WordPress plugins… it is evident that certain plugins don’t necessarily need to load their css and js on every page… but they DO load that extra stuff on every page!
This is something that should be fixed, maybe with another plugin :) or you could manually see what files are loaded by what plugins, and write up a conditional header loader and delete the wp_head function from your themes header function… problem here is that you would need to update for each new plugin and remove for deleted plugins.
For instance, several plugins will load a large javascript file, that only gets used on one or two certain pages! (i.e. wp-commerrce, calendar plugin, some of the facebook (and social app) plugins load a ton of extra code, and sometimes their servers experience huge delays, and that is transferred to the content loading on your blog!! Especially some of those Facebook plugins)
Many plugins don’t even load any extra code that will slow down WordPress, but just change some functionality or another (i.e. link order and category order … plugins like that.
I am using 37 plugins on WordPress right now… but am hoping to get up to the 50 mark within a few months!!
It seems to be a matter of choosing the right plugins if you don’t want to see a significant loading speed decrease.
i agree with you,when i reduce plugins that installed in my blog.
my website has very good speed!