A website with slow loading can be a disaster for your business. If your visitors have to wait for seconds / minutes for your website pages to load, it would frustrate them and they move on to your competitor’s websites unless you are selling something some $100 stuff for $1. Even a delay of few seconds in loading speed may impact your business heavily. In case of websites with millions of visitors everyday like Amazon, even few milliseconds of delay in loading speed may cost them millions of dollars.
So when it is absolutely clear that you can not afford to have a slow loading website then if your WordPress website is slowing down, whom to blame for it ? It could be the theme you have used or it could be a plugin. There can be multiple other factors which might be impacting your websites loading speed, check them in my previous article on Why a WordPress Website Slows down. As you can use only one active theme at a time, it is quite obvious to tell which them is obstructing your websites performance. But when it comes to Plugins, you can use many plugins at a time.So to find out which plugin is causing the issue is very difficult.
First lets check how to find your website’s speed :
- You can check your website’s speed on Google by using its Pagespeed Insights Tool. It will give you idea about overall performance of your website. If you don’t find a valid reason of your website’s slowing down here. The culprit may be one of your plugin.
- You can also check your websites overall performance on GTMetrix .
Both the above tools or other tools available for the same purpose will only give you idea about overall performance and speed of your website. They will not provide any information about your plugins performance.
To find out which plugin is creating the issue, you can use another plugin P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler). This is a free plugin and very efficient at profiling all the plugins used in the website.
How Does it Work – Once you install it, go to its settings page and start the scan. The scan is very detailed and may take few minutes to complete. It generates some random traffic on your website and monitors the plugins performance on the website loading speed. Once the scan is completed, click on view results and you can see how your plugins are performing. You can take your further steps based on the results.
