Plugin hogging resources?

It’s most likely that it’s not one plugin that’s doing it. It could be one, two 5, 10, your theme, etc.

But looking through there, I can see a range of plugins that are probably less then required. As a guide of what I think from looking at that list:

Should be able to be disabled without any issues:
All-in-One WP Migration
Child Theme Configurator
Real-Time Find and Replace
Search & Replace Version
Health Check & Troubleshooting

Most likely to be not needed for normal use:
Plugins Last Updated Column
WP Rollback

Cute idea, but never works in reality so not even worth having on the site:
WP Content Copy Protection with Color Design
WP Content Copy Protection with Color Design Plus

From that, you can see there’s a list that you can stat with getting rid of. At least deactivating them.

BUT… To find out wahts realyl going on, I’d suggest using this plugin:

https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/p3-profiler/

That will at least give you an idea of what’s happening bhind the scenes.

Hello Mew,

Firstly, Yeah you are using too many plugins which can impact site performance.

So the one that you don’t use on a regular basis you can eliminate those.

Also, as you have health checkup plugin already install use it and see if it give you some indication while troubleshooting.

Thanks,
Kartik

@catacaustic, @kartiks16,

Thank you for the advice. I’ve deactivated the following:
All-in-One WP Migration
Child Theme Configurator
Search & Replace Version
Health Check & Troubleshooting
WP Rollback

I’ve also tried activating Jetpack’s site acceleration feature.

It’s funny because I’ve received conflicting advice regarding the number of plugins one can use. Before when I inquired on a different forum here on WP.org whether too many plugins could impact performance, I was told that it wouldn’t matter much.

What’s really curious though is that this issue literally began within the last week or so, even though I’ve not made any major changes. Wonder what happened.

Anyway, I hope deactivating some of those plugins will show a noticeable increase in performance on my site. Thank you again for the advice.

Oh, one more thing…

I have Akismet installed but actually my site has comments disabled. Does this mean I don’t need the Akismet plugin?

Even though I have comments disabled, the Akismet page on the dashboard tells me that it’s blocked 16 spam this month, 50 spam last month, etc. What kind of spam is it blocking?

Even though I have comments disabled, the Akismet page on the dashboard tells me that it’s blocked 16 spam this month, 50 spam last month, etc. What kind of spam is it blocking?

@gokumew2 That’s a great question to ask here: https://www.ads-software.com/support/plugin/akismet/

It’s funny because I’ve received conflicting advice regarding the number of plugins one can use.

Yeaaaah that’s because it’s a weird thing. Strictly speaking, it’s NOT about the number of plugins but the interactions of the plugins with everything else on your site. And that includes “How people use the site.” Saying it’s all about the numbers is semi-accurate, but doing a large disservice to the nuances :/

The trick is solving “What plugins use more resources and when?”

There are thankfully some easy things you can pick at first.

* Contextual Related Posts – this loads on every page, so it has a high probability
* Wordfence Security – If improperly configured, it might cause high loads
* WordPress Popular Posts – Definitely a heavy hitter
* WP-Optimize – Has a tendency to not play well with caching

I would recommend getting rid of all related posts plugins and using the feature within Jetpack. It runs off of your website, which means any slowness will be on their server, not yours.

I’d also get rid of WP-Optimize, and double check everything in Wordfence. Make sure you’re only running what you MUST run. Extra checks, like blocking bad users from logging in, aren’t needed for everyone. If you’re using good passwords and not installing plugins and themes you haven’t checked first, you probably don’t need it right now.

Hi, @ipstenu.

Thanks for the detailed response.

At your advice, I’ve gone ahead and deactivated Wordfence and WP-Optimize. Unfortunately Jetpack’s related posts feature doesn’t have many customization options, and I use Popular Posts on my sidebar on every page. I’ve got the cache turned on for Contextual Related Posts so hopefully that will help.

This really is curious though since I had all these plugins running on my site for months and this issue only began within the last couple weeks. Before that my site was running smoothly. Wonder what happened…

Has there been a change to your visitors? Getting more than normal? Getting crawled by a search engine? Gone viral?

A lot of external aspects go into how a site performs.

You can also check out your version of PHP. Maybe you were auto updated and that isn’t playing well with a specific plugin. Maybe you’re still on 5.6 (I would go as high 7 as you can).

The most visitors I’ve ever had in a day was about 1500 one month ago (before things started getting sluggish) and I generally average around 50-150.

My site is running on PHP 7.2.