What’s the Story With Plugins?

Earlier today I had read a forum post where people were talking about how WordPress plugins might impact the speed or responsiveness of your site.

Since I do a lot of work writing custom themes and plugins I’ve always been of the opinion that a well written plugin is no more load on a site than the same code included in the theme. I remembered reading an article on WPTuts, Functionality: Plugins vs Themes, just a few days before and had thought that what they said certainly agreed with my personal experience.

But a person never really knows, do they?

And after seeing that forum post today I still had some doubts. It seems ‘logical’ that more stuff is going to slow things down more, doesn’t it?

Is There Any Right Answer?

I knew it wasn’t a question of there being only one right way or wrong way, but I kept thinking about it. Then suddenly it occurred to me. Because of some things I had been working on I could take a stab at checking this out myself. So I decided to do this post.

I had been working on setting up some demo sub sites for my IM programming and plugins blog over the past few days. I had uploaded three fresh WordPress installs in three sub directories.

I had activated the first and copied over 49 plugins. I had activated 9 of these. On sites 2 and 3 I hadn’t done anything. So I did the WordPress activation on them both, but didn’t do any other setup changes in the WordPress admin panel other than give the sites a name on the original activation page.

Then I installed the same 49 plugins (not activated) on demo site 2. So that was where I was at.

A couple of things before I continue. [check_list]

  • I deleted the default akismet plugin on demo 3, so there are no plugins installed at all.
  • My hosting for this site is at 1and1. They don’t have gzip compression activated for shared hosting. So I’ve always disliked that. The speed tests hate that I haven’t enable compression.
  • The WP Minify Plugin is wonderful. I use it to minify the css on sites.
  • On demo 2 and demo 3 there are no pages or posts other than what is included in the initial WordPress install.
  • In addition to Google’s Page Speed Test, I used the free speed test from GTmetrix. If you are new to working on optimizing your sites, this is an excellent place to start.

[/check_list]

Step 0 – Before running tests:

Site Plugins Installed Plugins Activated Site Content Theme
0 67 29 88 posts, 7 pages'normal' siteparent site of the three demos Custom
1 49 9 4 pages, 3 posts, nothing in them. Basic titles for Privacy, Contact, etc. Twenty Eleven (WP default)
2 49 0 1 post, 1 page.Hello World! and Sample Page Twenty Eleven (WP default)
3 0 0 1 post, 1 page.Hello World! and Sample Page Twenty Eleven (WP default)

Step 1 – Speed Tests without WP-Minify activated:

Site Firebug Page Speed Chrome Page Speed GTMetrix WP-Minify? Comments
0 74/100 67/100 72%/72% Off This is very slow. But activating wp-minify should help.
1 61/100 56/100 52%/76% Off Didn't expect this. Slower than Site 0. Is it the Twenty Eleven Theme? Or the 9 active plugins?
2 74/100 74/100 71/95 Off 49 Installed plugins.
3 74/100 74/100 73/95 Off 0 Installed plugins. Nearly identical results with Site 2.

Step 2 – Speed Tests With WP-Minify activated:

Site Test on Home Page Google Page Speed in Firefox Firebug Google Page Speed in Chrome GTMetrix (Page Speed / YSlow) wp-minify Activated? Comments
0 89/100 82/100 91%/82% Y I knew activating WP-Minify would make a big difference. But what about the demo sites?
1 85/100 56/100 52%/76% Y What is going on here? Why so slow?
2 91/100 70/100 73/95 Y
3 73/100 71/100 68/95 N Sites 2 and 3 with just bare WordPress installs perform terribly.

Is it the Twenty Eleven Theme?

Is the reason why the three new demo sites are so slow is because of the default WordPress Twenty Eleven Theme?

I changed demo site 1 to the same theme I use on the main site:

Site Test on Home Page Google Page Speed in Firefox Firebug Google Page Speed in Chrome GTMetrix (Page Speed / YSlow) wp-minify Activated? Comments
1 62/100 56/100 51%/74% Y The theme didn't make any difference.

Step – Speed Tests With WP-Minify activated:

Site Test on Home Page Google Page Speed in Firefox Firebug Google Page Speed in Chrome GTMetrix (Page Speed / YSlow) wp-minify Activated? Comments
0 N
1 N
2 N
3 N

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