The impact of plugins loading up in WordPress
This one happened back in December, but it’s still worth checking out. Milan Petrovic at Dev4Press did a bit of a study to discover the impact of various popular WordPress plugins. He covered 35 plugins in the post, and a few of them didn’t test very well at all.
Pro
That article was a great read. Hopefully inspires plugin developers to be cleverer about the way they construct their code. Limit loading of functionality only where it’s needed, as too many plugins that only add backend features still affect frontend memory usage.
Milan actually wrote a great follow up article giving plugin developers some tips for plugin optimisation.
Plugin performance posts such as this one bother me in that they freak people out.
“What? My plugins are ruining my site performance? What should I do???”
In reality, for most sites, just turn on page caching and forget about it.
In a followup comment the author mentions that plugins don’t affect performance for visitors when page caching is on.
Pro
I find it funny the article tries to call out bbPress for “bad optimization”.
Are you kidding me? Clearly the author has never used or benchmarked vBulletin, phpBB, SM2, etc – that’s what I consider a large foot print. A 4mb mem usage with a lot of nice hooks in place does not mean “bad optimization”.