Which WordPress plugins are slowing down your website?

The loading speed of a website is a crucial factor in ensuring a satisfactory user experience and improving search engine rankings. A slow site can cause the loss of visitors, affect the conversion rate and reduce the credibility of your brand. One of the main causes of this problem is poorly optimized or misconfigured plugins.
Identifying and optimizing plugins that negatively affect your site’s performance is essential to ensure its efficient operation. Below, we explain how to detect these plugins and what actions to take to improve the speed and stability of your website.

Why do some plugins slow down WordPress?

WordPress plugins are essential tools for adding functionality to your site, but not all of them are well optimized. Some common problems are:

• Poorly optimized code: plugins with inefficient PHP code consume more server resources.
• Excessive database queries: some plugins make too many queries, saturating the server.
• External resource load: plugins that rely on scripts, stylesheets or fonts hosted on external servers can slow down the load.
• Unnecessary functionality: plugins with many functions that you don’t use can overload your site.

How to identify slow plugins

1. Use query monitor

Query monitor is a free plugin that allows you to detect slow database queries.

• Install and activate the plugin
• Navigate to your site and open the query monitor menu in the administration bar.
• Go to “database queries” and check the plugins that perform the most queries or take the longest

2.Check resources with browser tools

• Open your site in Google Chrome and select “inspect” > “network” tab.
• Reload the page and analyze the files that take the longest time to load.
• Filter for external resources to identify scripts or plugin files that slow down the site.

3. Test manually

• Perform a speed test (for example, with Pingdom)
• Disable plugins one by one and repeat the test to see which ones affect speed.
• You can also disable all plugins and gradually activate them.

4. Google lighthouse

Google lighthouse analyzes your site’s performance, accessibility and SEO. Although it does not identify plugins directly, it helps to detect heavy resources that may be related to them.

Best practices for choosing plugins

• Check ratings and number of installs. Prefer popular and well-rated plugins.
• Frequent updates. Make sure the plugin is updated regularly.
• Specific functions. Avoid plugins with unnecessary functions.

Optimize performance without removing plugins

• Schedule heavy tasks. Such as image optimization or security scans at off-peak times.
• Minify and combine files. Use optimization plugins such as autoptimize to reduce resource size.
• Use a caching system. Plugins like wp rocket or w3 total cache improve loading speed.

Conclusion

Detecting and optimizing plugins that slow down your WordPress site is key to offer a better experience to your users. Use tools like query monitor, manual testing and Google lighthouse to identify problematic plugins and replace them with more efficient options.

Optimize your site and ensure optimal performance for your visitors.