I know you’re crazy about using plugins for your WordPress blogs. I am, too!
Plugins can enhance your blogs in so many ways. Do you want to encourage readers to sign up for your RSS feed? Is cutting down or eliminating comment spam important to you? How about optimizing your blog pings, streamlining your SEO efforts, automating backups, or even creating an archives page?
WordPress Plugins can be found for these and many other tasks. Check out the WordPress Plugin Directory where you can search over 1,500 plugins. Download as many as you want and try them out. No doubt you will find some real keepers.
The only caution here is that some plugins may not be updated to work with your WP version. Check the authors’ website to pick up the important details about the plugins you like. The best and most stable plugins are usually updated fairly quickly after WP is updated.
The downside to loading up your blogs with plugins is that too much of a good thing is…well, too much! Too many requests to your server to create your pages and your visitors are outta there. Why? It just takes too long. Also, all those plugins need to be kept up-to-date, so that means more time spent on blog maintenance.
Check to see if your theme and all the plugins you use are taking up too much server time by adding one line to the footer.php file of your theme:
<!-- <?php echo get_num_queries(); ?> queries -->
Essentially, we’re calling on the server to tell us how many times the server was accessed to create your page. The only way you will see the result of get_num_queries() is to go to your blog and View > Page Source. Look for a comment line in the footer, something like
<!-- 12 queries -->
If you see more than 20 or so queries, your server is being worked too hard and your pages will load slowly. Deactivate plugins, one at a time, and refresh your blog page. You’ll see the number of server requests, or queries, drop.
Delete plugins that are too costly in terms of the number of queries they demand and you’ll find a happy medium between too many requests that slow down your server and too few requests that make for a dull blogging experience.
A little Its a very good post. I use a lot of plugins for my site so will help me prune out the useless ones.
Wow! I had 43 queries, but my page is still loading fast. It is my own home server, so is that ok? It is not like I am bogging down a shared hosting plan and they are gonna kick/ban me. I am hosting it on IIS6/Windows Server 2003 and it loads fast still with 43 queries…so do I need to remove plug-ins or not?
Thanks
Hey Connor!
How are you checking whether your site is loading fast? If it’s via your own machine, are the pages cached already? Try viewing your site from an anonymous site or library computer that likely hasn’t seen it before to get the true picture. If you want to be kind to any dial-up users, then you’ll want to delete a few of those plugins so the pages load faster.
Good luck!
Hi Lizzyfin,
Without any plugins the number of queries on my site is 48. Is this the problem with the theme? With plugins it is 76. What should I do now. I don’t want to change the theme, because somewhere I read that changing the themes frequently will affect SEO.
Hey Samuel,
I see that your WP blog is using WP-Super-Cache to get around the potentially long page-loading time with having so many queries. Never mind though, your page loaded in 1.2 seconds so I doubt that will turn away many people. Good on ya!
I think it’s ok to change your theme once in a while. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to keep your pages fresh, and you’ll want to tweak things every so often. But I would steer clear of changing the entire layout very often. If you do that you might slip in a post letting your readers know to look forward to your new “look” before you actually start using a radically different theme.
Thanks for your comments,
Lizzyfin
That seems to be the main problem with plugins, they slow up your page load. They are so helpful with design and seo though.
One of the problems is, you never know what plugins will cause more time in the page loading. I had a lot of them-too many to mention- before I knew they compromised site loading. I sacrificed a few, and installed a cache plugin hopefully to help out on speed of loading . You can Check Out The Site and let me know your loading experience. We as Webmasters, do want the best user experience possible.
Thanks for the post
Hi,
I’m using WP 2.9.2 — and I get 17 queries with the default theme, and between 25-35 queries just with many of the free themes out there. No plugins installed.
Seems like just 1 or 2 plugins, and it already would start to slow things down.
How do the big, super dynamic sites with tons of dynamic script run so smooth — just really fast, powerful servers?
Don – a cache plugin is a great way to speed up loading of your pages – especially if you have more than a little traffic. Thanks for mentioning it!
Hi James,
As the WordPress blogging software has matured it has gotten more complicated with more capabilities that are standard in the basic version of WP. You used to need a set of plugins to perform some tasks that are now part of WP itself, so it makes sense that the basic, no-plugin version would produce a number of queries on its own.
The big and dynamic sites out there will rely on dedicated servers and multiple fast servers to dish out pages as fast as they are requested. No doubt some will use static homepages to help reduce the load on the servers.
As DON mentioned there are cache plugins that can help with speeding up page loading. One might look at WP-Cache for instance.
Happy blogging!
Thanks, your site was the first that showed up on google. I will be sure to weed out plugins I don’t need.
Hi Mark,
It’s really good practice to make sure your site loads up fast enough to keep your visitors interested. Reducing the number of plugins will definitely help with WordPress sites.
If it takes more than 15-20 seconds to finish creating a page, your visitors probably left a long time ago, and your server host may have something to say about resource consumption, if you’re on a shared server.
mine shows 235 at the footer. hahah..lol…thanku . i iwll reduce many