In these competitive times, speed is everything on the Internet.

For a long time now I have been concerned at how Head Rambles is very slow to load.  Not only was it affecting visitors but I believe Google intend to penalise slow sites, if they aren’t doing so already.

My particular concern was the plugins in use.  I had tried experimenting with these with little success as there are too many permutations and combinations.

Yesterday I came across a plugin that looked interesting – P3 Plugin Performance Profiler by GoDaddy.  To say I was impressed was to put mildly.  It very nicely loads the site into itself and gives a detailed breakdown of the load times of each plugin in use.

It instantly identified JetPack (by WordPress!) as a huge restriction.  As I had only loaded it as an experiment, I removed it.  I ran the tests again and it promptly threw up another – an Archive menu tool which I also removed.  In total I have reduced load time by almost 2 seconds per page, which isn’t too bad.  The only impact on the functionality of the site is that the archives aren’t quite so neatly presented.

I’m sure I will find a less resource hungry plugin somewhere, as a replacement!