Hi @szymonfortuna
thank you very much!
What robots see is important. In the end, the robots are unlogged users.
If you disable plugins for logged users, robots will still see what unlogged users see.
At the same time I want to limit number of plugins for logged members to keep the uncached site faster for them too. Am I thinking right?
You are thinking totally right. Disabling plugins for logged members is even more important. Usually, you can’t serve cached static pages to the logged users, and deactivating unneeded plugins can help in those cases because you remove the database queries of the disabled plugins and the unneeded HTTP requests.
Usually, you can serve cached static pages to unlogged users because you don’t need to show different content depending on the user. In those cases, you still have the benefits of fewer HTTP requests, but if the pages are served by the cache in any case you have no database queries.
So, the benefits of disabling plugins become higher when you need to serve non-cached pages, as usually you do for logged users.
Rank Math doesn’t consume much and you may not notice any important difference in terms of performance after you disable it.
However, its consumption isn’t totally zero, and together with other plugins, if they are many, you may notice a difference.
Many times, a single heavy plugin may consume more than a dozen of light plugins. This is not the case with Rank Math.
In any case, in my opinion, when you don’t need something, better you disable it.
Just be careful about what changes when a logged user wants to share a page on social networks that can be seen also by non-logged users.
If you are using Rank Math to set for example the image that appears on Facebook, or other socials, when someone shares the page, if you disable Rank Math the users may see a different image.
Apart from that, other situations do not come to mind in which you need Moth Rank for logged users.
I suggest you try to share the page without Rank Math when you are logged-in, and if it’s ok you can disable it.
About your second question, in the case of the WooCommerce add-ons you can usually see a noticeable difference in terms of performance when you disable them.
Plugins like WooCommerce Subscriptions work in the background and they rarely do something on a normal page load, but you need them on some pages. For example, on the user account page, you need WooCommerce Subscriptions to show the user subscriptions and all that they need (e.g. button to cancel the subscription…).
In the checkout, you need it to show the payment in installments, and in some cases also on the single product page if the product offers payment in installments. But on all other pages, you will not need it.
Something similar happens for the other WooCommerce add-ons.
It’s important you keep them active in Actions => WooCommerce on all those actions where they do something useful (e.g. Checkout ajax refresh), and everywhere you see something added by those plugins.
Disabling heavy plugins can make a huge difference in terms of performance, but you need always to test that all works as expected.
This is a general rule that is always valid. When you have doubts, test them. But even when you haven’t doubted, test it the same.
The PRO version comes with the auto-suggestion feature. Most of the time it will tell you when some plugins are needed or you can disable them, but you need always to check the preview and do some tests.
The auto-suggestion is a feature to speed up the process, but better always to do a few tests to be sure.
Also, do you maybe have a list or simply know how plugins…
I don’t have this kind of list, but a sort of list is silently included in the auto-suggestion feature of the PRO version.
The auto-suggestion is basically based on two things.
When you ask FDP PRO to suggest the needed plugins on a specific page, it visits that page every time disabling a different plugin, and it compares the page with all plugins active and without that plugin. It takes into account all the elements that are SEO relevant and the elements of the page body, and if it realizes that with or without a plugin the user would see the same output, it suggests disabling that plugin.
The second pillar of the auto-suggestion is practically the list that you asked for. For the most popular plugins the code of FDP PRO already knows when a certain plugin is needed, and in all those cases when it has a good level of confidence, it even doesn’t check the page with or without that plugin.
The auto-suggestion is not 100% perfect. It can’t be so because there are always some cases where the document appears the same with or without a certain plugin but you need that plugin. If that plugin is not popular, the auto-suggestion may fail in that case.
So, always check the page and/or the process after disabling plugins.
I know the plugin cleanup is not something that you quickly do like activating/deactivating the cache. It requires more time, and most of all more testing.
I hope it helps. If you have more questions let me know.
Have a great day!
Jose
