WordPress powers 20% of the Internet websites. As any WordPress webmaster will understand, plugins are an essential add-on. Plugins help to improve WordPress performance; however, at the same time, a plugin can drastically increase a blog loading speed. It is a known fact that websites that take an awful amount of time to load loses traffic, conversions and revenue. At most, a WordPress user has 3 to 4 seconds to impress a visitor.
If your WordPress website has become slow in the past couple of months, excessive plugins usage could be the issue. Therefore, to diagnose and counter the problem, you need to use the Plugin Performance Profiler, popularly known as the P3 Plugin.
This article presents a detailed P3 Plugin review.
P3 Plugin Review: How does it Work?
The P3 Plugin is backed by GoDaddy. Once installed, the plugin scans the existing installed plugins and presents a detailed analysis of what plugins are consuming more space and which plugins are consuming less space. When it comes to plugins, often a wrongly configured plugin or a heavy one causes the WordPress site to slow down.
The P3 Plugin is compatible with Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera and IE9 and above browsers.
Plugin Installation
- Login to WordPress Dashboard
- Click on Plugins > Add New
- Search for P3 or Plugin Performance Profiler.
- Click the ‘Install Now’ button
- Activate the plugin.
After activation, the plugin is visible from the ‘Tools’ menu. Go to the plugin and click on Scan Now > Auto Scan.
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P3 Plugin Review: Demonstration
The scanning takes some time, especially if the scan takes place for the first time and if your site has a lot of content.
Once the whole website is scanned, a report is generated. Here is a screenshot from one of my blogs before commencing the scan.
After P3 Plugin scan, here is the report.
As you can see, there is a marked difference in the report because a month lapsed between two scans and I have added more plugins. Hovering over the pie charts tells me which plugin is consuming more resources than others.
Other Factors
1. Detailed Breakdown: This shows how many seconds each of the plugins contributes to page loading speed.
2. Simple Timeline: This divided page load time into three factors: WP Core, Theme and Plugin and shows the time taken by each.
3. Detailed Timeline: This goes into a detailed analysis of core time, theme and plugins.
4. Query Timeline: It is necessary to have less number of queries. A higher number of queries increases load speed.
5. Advanced Metrics: This is a good metric to analyze loading factors of your site at the server level and make adjustments accordingly.
Endnote
After scanning, deactivate the P3 Plugin but do not delete it. Based on the P3 Plugin review, you can find out which plugins are causing the blog to slow down. Whether to remove the plugin/s is entirely your call. What I do is scan my blogs once a month using the P3 Plugin and monitor WordPress loading speed.
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