An update on my long running task to visualise the effect on server performance of changes to my WordPress websites.
Since 2015 I’ve been developing a routine to compare the effect on server response times of the top 12 WordPress plugins. I’m just about ready to publish some results.
Top 12 WordPress plugins – January 2016
The chart below shows the results I obtained in January 2016.
Each line represents the percentage of requests completed for the elapsed time. The lines to the left are better than the lines to the right. Here you can see that WooCommerce and NextGen are both pretty awful.
Akismet on the other hand, made little to no difference.
Source: https://github.com/bobbingwide/slog-bloat/blame/master/working/results/wp-top12-affect-accum.csv
WordPress 4.4 to 4.7
A similar chart, produced in January 2017 shows the performance of core WordPress for version 4.4 through to 4.7. As you can see WordPress got slower with each new release.
Current status – February 2021
I’ve made some major improvements to the routines in the last couple of months. Using the new Compare logic in slog, making use of the sb-chart-block plugin, and using slog-bloat’s vt-driver routine, it’s now possible to produce some basic comparisons fairly quickly.
Here’s a screen capture of the chart showing the effect of activating WooCommerce on the display of the home page of bobbingwidetechsupport.com.
Test scenario
- Vanilla-34 – current plugin configuration
- 34 active plugins, mostly oik based.
- 400 requests to the home page
- WooCommerce – WooCommerce activated.
- One product
- WooCommerce not needed on the home page.
- 400 requests to the home page
Results
Could be interpreted as:
- WooCommerce took over .15 of a second longer to run each request.
- WooCommerce added a 100% overhead.
- Site is twice as fast without WooCommerce.
Disclaimers
But, don’t read too much into these results.
- This was only a short test.
- We only visited the home page.
- The Chart needs more granularity.
It might be fair to say
“WooCommerce slows my site down”.
Herb Miller, February 2020
References
Plugins used:
- Slog – post process oik-bwtrace daily trace summary reports
- sb-chart-block – Chart block for Gutenberg
- Slog-bloat – Measuring the effect on server performance of plugin changes
- oik-bwtrace – debug trace for WordPress