[Bob Thornton]

Hello,
We have a site that unfortunately has a lot of plugins, so we are trying to optimize. When we run P3 plugin profiler or Query monitor, we consistently see the Connections plugin using the most resources- around 20% of the load. That seems high since we only have one list of about 300 contacts on the site. Can you let us know what we might do to lessen the impact?

not sure how to leave you the system URL privately.

[Bob Thornton]

This reply has been marked as private.

[Steven Zahm]

@ Bob

re: P3 plugin profiler or Query monitor, we consistently see the Connections plugin using the most resources- around 20% of the load.

P3, you can really take the results of that as only as a very rough indicator. Connections is not causing 20% load. The only page that will have a “hit” would be the directory page where the directory is being displayed and of course its admin pages.

A far much better tool to use is this:

https://gtmetrix.com/reports/cmbonline.org/c9sZe0Xp

I took a real quick look at just your home page. It is 8MB downloaded. Right there, that is one big reason for a slow load time. There is one image all by itself is greater than 1MB.

There is also, a lot, as in almost a couple hundred (rough estimate), of CSS and JS files being downloaded with a large chunk of them coming from Facebook, I suspect that little widget in the right corner of the footer.

Take a look at the Waterfall tab in GTmetrix, that whole last ~20% seems to be just Facebook content. One has to be careful with adding social media stuff to a site as that can add up and really slow down a site.

I highly suggest using WP Rocket (not affiliated with in any way) as they site optimization seems to just work with little setup. You still need to optimize those images. I believe the is a plugin called WP Smush that can help with that.

I hope this helps get you on the right track to better your site load time.

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