This article might get a little nerdy and doesn’t have much to do with comics, but I feel like some people should know about it.

I am a bit of a fiend about the speed of this website. Probably more than most people that I know. So when I recently started getting significantly slower loading speeds (in like the 4-5 second range) and my Google Pagespeed score dropped significantly, I was left thinking it was mainly my theme update.

I’ve had a number of plugins for a long time that help me with site caching, image optimization and all of that jazz. And I have a few other plugins that are for more fun things and some interesting functionality, but as I started noticing, there was one plugin causing some slow downs because it wanted to load first.

So I shut it down. Boom. A small step up.

But there was still something bogging down site. Finally I found an article in a forum somewhere (I was deep in the nerd muck) that mentioned that sometimes plugins don’t agree with your site’s theme.

Interesting.

I decided to just go through and turn off a few plugins that I love, but are unnecessary to the running of my site. Nothing really changed, but then I got to the ones that I felt were critical… My caching plugin (W3 Total Cache) and my image optimizing plugin (WP Smush.it). And I turned them off.

Woo! Instantly better. (Just look at the graph at the top!)

Turns out some of the plugins that I’d trusted for a long time weren’t agreeing with my site any more. It’s not to say that they are bad plugins at all, but for whatever reason… we’d grown apart and it was time to start seeing other people.

I have since moved to EWWW Image Optimizer and WP Super Cache for image optimization and caching of my pages. Ones that had previously not impressed me, but they work great now.

Lesson: Don’t be afraid to try shutting down some plugins in the name of site speed. Sometimes, things change.

If most of this article is above your head, but you have a website… you may want to check out: The Ultimate Guide to Launching a WordPress-Powered Blog by John Saddington. I highly recommend this long series of articles. It’s good stuff.