That’s a big issue in times where search engines are favoring fast loading websites. It also may mean that you have to upgrade your hosting to keep up with the performance requirements of your website.

P3, Plugin Performance Profiler, is a free WordPress plugin that analyzes the performance of frontend plugins. Frontend plugins are all plugins that are executed during page loading time.

Installation

Just open Plugins > Add New in your WordPress admin dashboard and search for P3. Click on the Install Now link to install the plugin, and on Activate on the next screen to activate it. You can alternatively download it from the official WordPress Plugin repository to install it manually on your blog.

Usage

Open Tools > P3 Plugin Profiler and click the Start Scan button to run the standard scan. The program will load several posts and pages from your site to calculate individual plugin performance data. You can alternatively run a manual scan instead, which allows you to pick the pages and posts that you want to load on the site. The benefit here is that you can specify exactly which posts and pages you want to use for the sample.

Once done, results are displayed in the program interface.

You should now see the average plugin impact on the site’s load time, the number of MySQL queries that are run per visit and a runtime breakdown by plugin.

If plugin impact appears to be to high, or if you have a plugin installed that is using a lot of resources, you may want to consider replacing it or removing it completely from the site. You can deactivate plugins before you run the test again to see if the deactivation has a positive impact on the frontend page loading times. You could furthermore install an alternative to see if it is lighter on the resource side.

There is however no option to compare scans with each other, which is unfortunately. It is also not clear why the performance profiler itself is listed in the results, as it does not really make a whole lot of sense.

Still, if you are hearing complaints from readers or are noticing server peak load times and resource usage, you may want to check out the Plugin Performance Profiler plugin to see which plugin may be causing it.

Webmasters can do several things to reduce the page loading time of their websites. Services, such as Page Speed, GTMetrix or various browser add-ons aid in finding the page elements that take the longest to load.

Images that have not been optimized are usually listed as a recommendation. Optimized in this regard means a reduction of an image’s size without a reduction in image quality.

WordPress blog owners can install the free WordPress plugin WP-Smush.it that uses Yahoo’s Smush.it service to reduce the size of images. The plugin works automatically in the background: It sends all uploaded images to Yahoo’s image compression service and uploads that optimized version to the server, instead of the unoptimized original version.

It furthermore allows to optimize already uploaded images. WordPress users need to go to Media > Library where they see a Smush.it column next to each uploaded imaged and a link to Smush.it now!.

A click on the link sends the individual image to the Smush.it service where it will be processed and then re-uploaded to the web server.

The size reduction depends largely on the original state of the image. It usually ranges between 0% to 30%.

A big usability issue is that there is no option to mass optimize existing images. We host more than 10,000 images here at Ghacks and optimizing them all individually would be to time consuming.

While it is possible to download and optimize the images locally, or run an external optimization script, it is also possible to utilize the Firefox add-on Multi Links, or one of its alternatives, to speed up the image processing.

Multi Links users can select all links on a media library page at once. For this they need to install the Firefox add-on first. They can then hold down the right mouse button to draw a rectangle around all Smush.it links on the WordPress library page to execute all of them at once. This works very well. All links are opened in new tabs that can be closed after they have loaded.

It is therefor essential for webmasters to regularly check the links that are posted on their websites and blogs to make sure that they are still pointing to the initial resource and do not return a 404 not found instead.

One of the best ways for WordPress webmasters is to install the WordPress plugin Broken Link Checker which will automatically check all posted links in all blog posts regularly to ensure that the links are valid. The initial lookup can take between a few minutes to several hours depending on the amount of posts and links on the blog. It took about 10 hours to find and check all links that have been posted at Ghacks.

The broken link count will be updated all the time and it is possible to deal with those links right away even if the plugin is still having links in the work queue. A click on the broken link count will open a table that displays 20 broken links per page.

The webmaster can display details about the link which will list the date of the link check and the error code that was returned. It is possible to delink right from the table which will remove the a tag from the link and keep the anchor name. Other possibilities are to exclude the link from future checks (good for false positives), to edit the url or to edit the post itself.

The plugin will automatically line-through broken links that have not been dealt with by the webmaster to inform visitors that the links are not working. The Broken Link Checker plugin is an excellent way of finding and removing broken links from a WordPress blog.

Many websites go down if visitors reach a critical level. It has also happened in the past that the webhosting company decided to disable the website because of the massive traffic. Yes, that has happened to Ghacks as well in the past.

Caching can help to reduce the load which means that the server or host can serve additional visitors. It can also decrease page load times which is the obvious benefit for visitors. I decided to give the WordPress plugin Super Cache a try. It is basically the most advanced caching plugin for WordPress. Installation was a big difficulty because of server permissions that had to be changed to run the script properly.

The script is now working properly and I could not discover any errors or problems so far. It would be nice if you would let me know if you encounter any errors on my website so that I can fix them asap.

You simply use the right-click menu when you have found a link that leads to a theme or plugin for WordPress that you want to install. Choose either to install a Theme or Plugin so that OneClick Installer places it in the correct directory. It works well with zipped plugins and themes which are automatically unzipped during the process.

The One Click Installer WordPress plugin needs to be activated first and both the plugins and themes folder needs a chmod of 755 so that the Firefox extension is able to place the files in the directories.

You would then install the Firefox extension and right-click a theme or plugin to place it in the corresponding folder of your WordPress blog. Plugin diagnostics tell you if everything is configured correctly which is a great way to check if everything is working correctly.

One Click Installer can be password protected to protect your WordPress plugins and themes from being overwritten by other users and offers a so called Purgatory which offers a secure way of deleting plugins and themes.

It can also backup your plugins and themes and store them locally as zip files for later usage. The author is currently developing a version that makes it possible to auto-activate those plugins and themes as well.

found: Digital Inspiration