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WordPress

Posted by Ivan Juras
Ivan Juras
1,238 Points

Do back end-plugins add weight to the load time of the actual web site?

Hi, I was wondering if the back end plugins (such as the ones for customizing the look and feel of the admin dashboard) affect the actual load time for the web site itself, or do they only affect the load time of the back end stuff (such as admin dashboard itself)? Thanks!

2 Answers

Chris Shaw
Chris Shaw
26,676 Points
Chris Shaw
Chris Shaw
26,676 Points

Hi Ivan,

In general you shouldn't notice anything with a few plugins but you will start to notice things once you reach 5-10 plugins as WordPress has to do a lot of folder/file processing to detect and load the plugins which over time can degrade the overall performance of your site.

However I've found using Nginx over Apache improves performance if you use a proper caching engine such as fastcgi_cache which ensures PHP only loads a file when it's need the performance improves quite a lot.

https://rtcamp.com/wordpress-nginx/tutorials/single-site/fastcgi-cache-with-purging/

Aside from all that I would recommend only installing plugins you truly need instead of ones that only serve one purpose such as integrating Google maps.

Ivan Juras
Ivan Juras
1,238 Points
Ivan Juras
Ivan Juras
1,238 Points

Thanks for your quick answer Chris. Let me just make sure that I got it right. When you said:

"... as WordPress has to do a lot of folder/file processing to detect and load the plugins which over time can degrade the overall performance of your site..."

Does this mean that even the plugins that are meant ONLY for back-end stuff (such as changing the dashboard colors) can have an effect on the actual page loading time for your users? I'm not talking about the admin dashboard load time, but the actual front-end of the site itself (posts, pages etc).