WordPress plugins help you in adding new functionalities to your site. But having too many WordPress plugins installed can slow down your site. In this post, we will be talking about how to use plugins wisely and make your site load faster.
So, it is important to filter the necessary ones and get rid of others. A slow-loading site is a big NO. You can think of a plugin as an extra set of code that gets added to your site.
As the amount of code on your site increases, your WordPress site will get heavier. As a result, your site will slow down.
I have previously talked about some steps that you can take to speed up your WordPress site, you should give it a read as well.
Generally speaking, around 20 plugins are a good number. But if your site is hosting on a shared hosting service, the number should be lesser, around 5-8.
Head over to your Dashboard right now and check out the plugins which are rarely used. Uninstall the plugins that you have not been used in quite some time.
Some plugins can even cause security breaches and harm your site. Make sure to install the plugins from trustworthy developers. Ones that get regular updates and have a large number of downloads.
Also Read: Yoast SEO WordPress Plugin Review & Installation Guide
Table Of Contents
Blame a badly coded plugin
It is true that installing many WordPress plugins can slow down your site. But if all the plugins that you are using are coded well, it might have very little effect on your site.
Even if you have more than 20 plugins which are well-coded, your site would load faster, compared to if you had 15 badly-coded plugins.
How much a plugin slows down your site depends on how it is coded and where it gets loaded. Most plugins are coded in PHP.
Page builder plugins, sliders, etc. impact the front-end part of your site. Plugins that perform tasks such as creating backups impact the back-end part.
Naturally, plugins that impact your front-end affect your site’s performance more than the ones which are designed for only specific tasks.
Plugins that check for broken links and monitor your site can slow down the site as well.
Also Read: WordPress Plugins Explained In Layman Terms | GarimaShares
How exactly does a plugin slow down a site?
Plugins slow down your site by making additional requests. The front-end plugins might be providing you with custom styling options.
For these custom styles, extra CSS or JS codes has to be loaded. Any extra requests made result in slowing down your site.
The plugins which display related or popular posts take time to load because they access your database in order to show them.
You can differentiate a good plugin by the number of times it loads and makes requests while your site loads.
Also Read: WordPress Plugins Explained In Layman Terms | GarimaShares
Check your site’s speed
Head on to GTmetrix to run a speed test on your site right now. Take a screenshot or note down your speed so that you can run it again after completing these steps. You’ll be able to check exactly how much did you make your site load faster.
This below, is a speed report of my site as taken on July 16, 2020.
Your site’s performance is measured in two scores, PageSpeed score and YSlow score. The average PageSpeed score is 75%, same is for the YSlow score.
On the right side of performance scores, you can see the page details. It shows you how fast your home page loads. The time it takes, the size of the page and the number of requests that are made before your page loads completely.
The average page size is 3.18 MB, average fully loaded time is 7 seconds and the average number of requests that site makes is 88.
So, by knowing all these details you can see that the score is pretty great except for the YSlow score which is the average score. Ideally, your site should score higher than the average score in each item.
See what is slowing down your site
Click on the arrow at the beginning of each row. You’ll be shown a list of elements that are making your site load slower.
The most common reasons for a site slowing down are uncompressed images, google fonts, headers and CSS/JSS styling elements.
With each element, GTmetrix will also give you a hint on how to improve it. When I checked my scores, I noticed that Google fonts was one of major issues.
Fonts were taking too long to load. I was using Easy Google Fonts WordPress plugin. I switched to Google Fonts Typography WordPress plugin and the result was amazing. Here’s the updated speed score,
My fully loaded time decreased from 4.2 seconds to 3.7 seconds. YSlow score has increased from 75% to 79%.
It didn’t just load fonts faster but it also has more customization options. You can set fonts individually for not only your paragraphs and headings but also your menu, sidebar, footer and site title.
Do give Google Fonts Typography plugin a go.
There are also plugins that monitor 404 errors and track broken links which can add heavy load and overwhelm the server resources. Instead of using those plugins, you should use a third-party cloud services like Ahrefs or SEMRush that automatically track broken links and offer a lot of other useful SEO insights as well.
If you don’t want a premium solution, then you can use a free tool like Broken Link Check which lets you check 300 pages at a time for broken links.
How many plugins should you be using?
You can see in the above picture that I have 29 plugins installed on my site and the site fully loads in 4.2 seconds.
Aim at the quickest load time possible. The faster the better.
You can have up to 50 plugins installed on your site and it would load fast if they’re well coded. So, I would suggest you to go to your dashboard and analyze the plugins you have installed.
If it is not absolutely necessary and if it is just for decorative purpose, uninstall it.
For instance, I had the Facebook like button’s plugin installed. It looked cool, an option for a reader to like my posts when they’re logged in to Facebook.
But it is not actually that fruitful. It created additional requests and slowed down the page’s speed.
Plugins available on WordPress are trustworthy. Check the number of downloads and the last update received to select the best ones.
If you’re buying a premium plugin from some other source, make sure to check their reviews first.
Let me know if these steps helped you in making your site load faster. Here are some other useful reads that I think you’d be interested in:
How to Setup Google Amp On A WordPress Site
How to Use Link To Text Fragment Extension on Google Chrome
10 SEO Benefits of Internal Linking
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