Quick Tip: Speed kills - How many plugins can you have on your website before it hurts your speed?

byStevensayshi

157 followers

Updated 6 years ago

Quick Tip: Speed kills - How many plugins can you have on your website before it hurts your speed?

According to most articles on the internet the maximum number of plugins you should have on a shared hosting wordpress website is FIVE. uggh, I have five plugins before I even start building my page. So I researched this issue a little further and I figured out the magic number of plugins you can have on your wordpress site is -- it depends. LOL

Honestly, here's the reason. A plugin is basically pre-written code. How well that code is written will influence how much work WordPress has to do to read that code. A poorly written plugin will slow down your website.

On the other hand , a well written plugin or a "light" plugin (light - means a plugin without much coding to create it) will not slow down your website at all.

Frontend vs backend plugins

Frontend plugins are plugins that your website visitors see and use. These plugins are most of the time the plugins that will affect your website's loading speed.

Backend plugins are plugins that you use as an administrator. Because they have nothing to do with the frontend of your website they "usually" do not influence page loading speed.

How to test if a plugin is influencing your page speed?

I use a plugin called GXmetrix it's a free plugin you can use to test your overall website speed.

If you are having a slow website there are a few things you can do that are not too technical.

1. Test your frontend plugins - The first thing you can do is test your frontend plugins to see how each one influences your webpage speed. You can test them by deactivating them one at a time and then doing a page speed test. Usually you will find the offender this way.

2. Test your backend plugins - Do the same with your backend plugins.

3. If you find one plugin that's really slowing down your website then exchange it with another plugin that is like it. Be sure to read how many downloads a plugin has had and read the reviews. Someone will mention website speed most of the time.

3. Use plugins that help speed your website loading time. There are plugins that will adjust your website to load faster without changing the frontend of your website. It basically does that by rewriting the code to be read better by wordpress.

This was more than I planned on writing but I hope it helps someone.

Best of luck! Have a great day!