Pagespeed results from google are giving a server response time of 1.5 seconds with my wordpress site. The site has 50+ plugins installed with 95 database queries. Is that part of the ‘server response’ time? Total time to load all plugins is .70, so something else is going on. Just not sure what affects the server response time.
I have a mybb forum on the same server/account (different domain name) and server response time is .35 . They are both run through cloudflare with the same settings (aggressive optimization). So I don’t think it’s a cloudflare or host issue because of the big difference between WP and MyBB. So something with the theme maybe? Or the plugins? Or something else… Any ideas?
Absolutely. The more complexity you put into Wordpress (or any other CMS), through plug-ins or ‘heavy’ themes, the longer it will take your server you process a page request. This is proven by the fact that a myBB page loads much quicker than than a Wordpress page.
CloudFlare adds to that latency because dynamic content is usually not set up to allow caching by browsers, so for every request to your Wordpress or myBB pages, CloudFlare first has to grab that page from your server before it can send it off to the client. While this may add some milliseconds to your response time, you don’t see this with myBB, so the bigger issue is that Wordpress is bloated: those 50+ plug-ins all require a little extra processing, not to mention that grand total of 95 database queries.
If you’re on shared hosting, there’s not a whole lot you can do except simplifying your Wordpress installation where you can by reducing the amount of plug-ins. I assume W3 Total Cache is among those 50+ plug-ins?
Wordpress.org has some optimization tips: WordPress Optimization « WordPress Codex
50+ plugins…wow, that’s a lot!
I’ve managed to get it down to 12 and if I didn’t need them all to run the site’s functionality etc, then I’d be running a lost less.
i agree that 50+ plugins is a whole lot of plugins. you’re never going to achieve decent performance with that kind of overhead.
my site isn’t terribly complex but i’m using 10…most of which are security related…
there’s a plugin (yes, i know) called P3 - Plugin Performance Profiler that can help identify where your bottlenecks are…