Very Helpful Tool

I “manage” a lot of WordPress sites. But I’m not a “webmaster.” When I use many of the other site tools out there and get recommendations like “Take all the javascripts in your WP Theme & Plugins and merge them into 1” that just isn’t feedback I can actually use.

When P3 breaks down what your Core, Theme, & Individual Plugins are doing to your site load times, it’s information I can easily act on. I can weigh how much I value a plugin, it’s load cost, and then make a decision.

Almost all the plugins I tend to use ring up small times on P3, with 2 big and unfortunate exceptions. Jetpack clocks in at 600ms and Yoast SEO at 300ms. They’re both fantastic plugins, but just the 2 of them mean a full second slower page loads? The research on how deterring even a 100ms slow down in load time is so devastating it’s hard to believe that anything is worth 900ms!

I asked the Jetpack team about this and they very politely replied that P3 was a “great” plugin… “but”… Their “but” was that by it’s nature P3 can only run as a logged in user. So it’s clocking things that Jetpack only does for logged in users like Stats & Sparklines. Although they couldn’t give me a number, the Jetpack team felt that for a non-logged in user, or “reader,” the Jetpack hit on page load would be much smaller.