arrows graphic

I was working on getting my websites health in check. One of the things that I was concerned with was the effect of the plugins on my site health. In my website building education I see that possibly too many plugins or a plugin that is not working can effect your site speed and overall site health. Check it with the P3 plugin for wordpress. I have seen the too many plugins theory in several places lately. There also seems to be a school of thought that it doesn’t matter how many plugins there are it is how they act and interact with each other. After surfing around and speaking with some colleagues I learned about the P3 plugin for WordPress. P3 was developed by Kurt Payne along with Go Daddy and has a stellar rep.

It seems that though plugins is what makes the WordPress platform so versatile sometimes they can negatively impact your sites performance. The P3 plug in will scan your site and give you a report on how the plugins on your WordPress site are effecting your site and load time.

The plugin is free and easily accessible from the WordPress dashboard. Just scroll down to plugins then add new and search for P3, Install and activate. That simple. Then your set to scan. You would think you get reliable results. Well you do and you don’t. P3 actually “changes its environment” in order to measure it, so getting precisely accurate results is impossible. But it can act as a guide as you use it more and more. You will be able to track changes in your plugins usage and make informed decisions as to keep certain plugins.

Heres what the results of a scan look like. As you can see the pie chart shows a comparison of the plugins usage or weight on the load time. Doing this scan and following the results can give you an idea of what is happening with your sites load time.


Then you can view a Detailed Breakdown and see the results on a different graph.

Along with a simple or detailed timeline where you can see the actual activity when loading.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You can also view the Query Timeline

And the last section is Advanced Metrics where you can see overall site statistics

Using the history tab you can view prior scans and compare activity.

Using P3 as a tool to help keep your site running smooth is recommended but you have to take the results with a grain of salt. Due to it ever changing nature you must expect P3 to have some anomalies at times. Some of the things that affect the consistency of P3’s reporting are

  • Other activity on your server (in the case of shared servers)
  • Server side processes
  • Traffic fluctuations
  • Plugin activity (i.e. what a plugin is doing at the time a scan takes place)

Knowing this you can easily make comparisons in the activity from time to time and act accordingly. The developers recommend that you take several scans at different times before making decisions. Other users have suggested that when not scanning P3 be deactivated as it is a heavy plugin in itself and has no need to be active all the time.

Your site load speed is very important to the user experience. People don’t want to wait around for a slow site to load. It also immediately puts them in a negative experience and it will be harder to connect. So with the help of tools like P3 plugin for WordPress we can keep an eye on important statistics that will effect our websites performance in the grand scheme of things.

I’d love to hear from you if you have any questions or would like to comment about your experience with P3 leave a rely here or email me at