Will using too many plugins slow down a qa website?

Question

My web hosting provider is telling me i am using too many plugins and that's why my website is too slow. Does that make sense ?

Answer 1

Obviously yes!

Plugins which have to be loaded with every page of your website, need database access, need more number of http requess and/or are not well written will definitely slow down your website.

Plugins which comes with the official version are generally checked thouroghly before they are bundeled with the setup. If you are using many third party/old plugins you can disable/delete it to see the difference yourself.

Answer 2

It depends on what the plugin does. If the plugin queries the huge tables and consumes more io operations definitely slow down the website. If the plugin is optimized correctly there wont be any harm.

Answer 3

Absolutely. There are many non-optimized plugins out there.

Tip: Enable debugging (see DEBUG_ flag in qa-config.php) and see the new field on the bottom of your website. This holds all queries with time execution in ms. Then you can see where the most load happens. Extremely helpful.