Help Speeding Up WordPress For Photographers

I’m an advocate of using as minimal plugins on WordPress websites. I try to build features I want into a WordPress theme.  Lately there has been chatter in the WordPress world where people are saying to use plugins.

Here is my take on it.

If you do not understand how to build functions into your WordPress theme, then use plugins.

If you do understand how to build functions into your WordPress theme, then do not use plugins.

Easy enough, right?

So how do you determine which plugins are causing your site to slow down, or too much strain on your host/server?

Check out P3 Plugin Performance Profiler.  It’s a WordPress plugin that you install only to diagnose your plugin usage.  It helps determine which plugins are slowing down your site and will create performance reports for your site.  Often times, WordPress sites load slowly because of poorly configured plugins or because there are so many of them. By using the P3 plugin, you can narrow down any plugins causing slowness on your site.

In the Runtime by Plugin graph, you can see that WordPress SEO and Cart 66 are both running pretty hard.

In the Detailed Timeline you can see when plugins stop performing during page load.  As you can see, not many of them are running for too long (aside from the WordPress core application.

The plugin also shows an overall view of your plugin impact.

• Plugin load time
• Plugin impact of page load time
• SQL Database queries

My recommendation is to activate the plugin, see what is causing too much slowdown and remove those plugins.  If nothing else, it gives a great overview of easy ways for you to improve your page speed and in turn, page rank (as Google now uses speed as a ranking factor).

Thanks for reading and happy blogging,

Scott

Thank you for reading the Scott Wyden Imagery blog. I am a Manalapan, New Jersey Photographer sharing my passion for photography any way I can. I am also the Community & Blog Wrangler at Photocrati, teaching other photographers on how to increase business with their website.

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