How different active plugins affect WordPress website’s performance?

 

Plugins are very useful tools as they help to enhance the functionality of a WordPress website. By using these helpful add-ons, you can add extra functions and features to a basic WordPress website. Although the use of plugins give you an opportunity to open new potential for your website, too many plugins active on your website may also disrupt its performance.

 

Since, these add-ons also use resources, they might cause delay in loading-time, eventually degrading a website’s performance. Here in this post, we are going to discuss about the potential impact of these plugins on a website and how they affect its performance.

 

How can active plugins affect a WordPress website?

 

To understand the effect of too many WP add-ons on a website, we can use an analogy between operating systems and applications. A website is like an operating system and plugins are the applications that run on the operating system.

 

Like applications, plugins need resources to run. Some of the plugins also run in the background. Since, running a large number of applications at once can cause performance issues in an operating system, this can also happen in case of websites and plugins.

 

As soon as a person visits your website, first its core files are loaded and then active plugins are loaded. Since, each plugin has different features and functionality, they work in different ways.

 

Some plugins may make calls to the database in the backend, others may bring assets to the front-end like Images, JavaScript files, CSS style sheets, and so on. Loading assets and database queries increase the load time of your website. This is because in order to load the assets most plugins make an HTTP request and every request affects website’s load time. Thus, if you use multiple plugins they make too many HTTP requests which impact the performance of your website.

 

Does the quality of plugins matter?

 

While it is a great advice to use lesser website add-ons for a WordPress website, if the quality of the plugins is better they may have lesser effect on a website’s performance. A bad plugin runs more and more files, even those that are not important. On the other hand, a good plugin is optimized to use lesser resources and load only essential files. Using too many of bad plugins will disrupt the performance of your website drastically.

 

How you can control plugins?

 

As we have mentioned in the above point, well-coded add-ons may not have any substantial impact on a website’s performance. Thus, you should opt for the plugins which are required by you, have good reviews, and are recommended by trusted resources. However, if you use too many of good plugins, you may still face performance-related issues, as there will be more code to be loaded on your website. Hence, you should aptly choose website add-ons to use on your website.

 

Is there a way to check files loaded by WP plugins?

 

You can check the files being loaded by plugins to know how they are affecting your site by using the developer tools of your browser. First, visit your website then right click and choose ‘Inspect’ to open the developer tools panel. After this click on the ‘Network’ tab and reload your website. Once the page reloads, you will be able to find details about how the browser loads each file.

 

This is the best way to analyze your website’s performance. You can check which pages or assets are causing delay in your site’s loading. Apart from this, you can also utilize some third-party tools to check & analyze such details more effectively.

 

Conclusion

 

Although plugins are helpful tools that enable you to add extra features and functions to your site, they may also cause performance related problems if not used wisely as they use resources. Besides the number of add-ons their quality is also an important factor whether or not they have impact on your site’s loading time. A well-coded plugin may have no or very little impact on website’s performance, but a roughly designed add-on certainly degrades your site’s performance.

 

Author Bio:

 

The post has been penned by Jean Turner who is a senior premium WordPress plugins developer with theem’on, a fast growing WordPress Theme and templates development company. Apart from creating great WordPress plugins, Jean also has a flair for writing informative blogs relating to the development and marketing of these themes, templates and plugins.