[Plugin: P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler)] Help! Installing P3 Profiler crashes my site

BPS does not “mess” with .htaccess files. It creates brand new .htaccess files for you website. BPS is a website security plugin that uses .htaccess files to secure your website. The primary security function of BPS is to create .htaccess files.

To remove the BPS .htaccess files you can either activate Default Mode and use the wp-admin .htaccess file delete in Security Modes or you can just delete them by using FTP or your Web Host Control panel. Delete the .htaccess file in your website root folder and delete the .htaccess file in your wp-admin folder.

I took a look at your website (300 Requests 4.4 MB initial load – viewed with Firebug) and it looks like it is loading slowly because you are not using a caching plugin and you have a lot of scripts loading at one time and image files appear to be overly large or improperly loaded (not using CSS repeat). Try installing a caching plugin and then if that does not speed up your site to an acceptable load speed then you may want try other things that will increase website performance. Even with NoScript in FF your site does not complete loading in a timely manner. It appears that your graphics may be overly sized. The background image takes a very long time to complete. is it a repeated background image or a full image?

Use FireFox with add-ons to diagnose your performance problems. install the NoScript add-on and Yslow add-on and Firebug add-on.

Overall it appears that you technical issues that need to be corrected. ie too many scripts loading at the same time, image file sizes not repeated, etc etc etc

FYI – you can change the default number of Posts that load at one time. the default is 10 posts and i personally think that no more than 3 posts should be loading at one time.

Props to AITpro for a very thorough response!

As for 500 problems when activating P3, I’ve seen this happen most commonly when a site was running very close to its memory limit. When you activate P3, it pushed it just over the limit and this error happened.

Removing P3 should fix the error right now. For the long term, consider raising the memory limit. You can confirm this is the case by looking for errors related to “memory limit” in your error logs.

To remove P3, remove the following files and folders via FTP:

wp-content/plugins/p3-profiler (the whole folder)
wp-content/mu-plugins/p3-profiler.php (if it exists)

Thanks. Yeah i imagine that 300 file requests and a 4.4MB initial page load might require just a little bit of memory. LOL I think this website owner needs to reduce the file requests and size down quite a bit – somewhere around 100K or if using pre-loaders then you can go much higher. I think 100 file requests is probably the most you ever want to do and if you have gigantic image files you can use CSS repeat to only load a repeating image. So yeah before this site owner raises his memory limit he / she needs to address the issue of “more is not always better”. ??

@aitpro – thanks for the thorough response. You make many valid points. I am not a pro web designer and cobbled this together using templates, limited html knowledge, and plugins. Since your post, I think the load time is much improved after I did the following:

1) My social sharing plugin was taking forever calling the server to get share counts. After removing it, things improved dramatically.
2) I killed a few other plugins that weren’t necessary. After that I was able to install P3.
3) I installed and activated W3 Total Cache, which I think is helping, but I can’t be 100% sure. The results on tools.pingdom.com have been mixed.

There are 4 other items slowing down performance that I still need to address:

4) According to that Yoast WordPress SEO was the next culprit dragging my performance down. Do you know of any speedier SEO alternatives?
5) I need to reduce large image sizes. Is there a plugin that can help do this on the back-end without having to manually re-upload each image?
6) Is there an easy way to ensure the content gets loaded before all the scripts do on the site? Does the W3 Caching already do that?
7) I still want to show the share buttons on the front page and on top of each full post. I can’t seem to find anything lightweght to do that. Any suggestions?

Thanks for your help!

PS – I am also planning to reduce the number of posts loaded on the front page to speed things up.

1. Yep saw that with Firebug. I think they are neat, but not worth the cost of waiting for a million external requests to complete. ??

2. Cool.

3. You should experiment with the different caching options in W3TC and benchmark each test in FireFox. The reason for this is some options settings in W3TC work well for some sites and not for other sites depending on what you are trying to load.

4. I use the All in One SEO plugin and have always been very happy with it.

5. W3TC caching will attempt to handle image files the best it can and reduce the load as best as possible. If you are calling image files with img tags and in CSS and not trying to load them statically then the size is not a big deal. If the image files are part of your Theme or other graphics then you can reduce their size by saving (rendering for web) them as png’s. Also your background image takes forever to load. I suspect that you are not using CSS repeat.

6. Yep W3TC will definitely help with this. You can try and use Minify in W3TC, but because of the difficulty of making this really work for the millions of different possibilities with websites – my hat is off to Frederick Townes for even attempting this – this is 50/50. One trick you can do is move all your js script calls to the bottom of your pages so the js scripts load last. The ideal way to handle this is to manually combine scripts into 1 or more to lessen the requests, but this obviously means that you have to do some code hacking.

7. Don’t have a suggestion. I have been meaning to look around, but have not gotten around to it.

Yep you should see a noticeable difference when you set the default posts per page from 10 to 3.

And i just took a look at your site and it appears to be loading at least twice as fast and maybe even faster than that. very nice improvement.

Also check into increasing your memory limit as Kurt Payne suggested, but do not exceed the max memory limit that your Host allows or your Host may decide to penalize you for that.

AITpro – Thanks for sll the advice! Per your suggestion, I compressed my background and logo images and will do the same for others as soon as I get to it. Will also look into AIO SEO. I heard of it, but opted for Yoast because I liked his documentation.

I am having trouble parting with my default posts/page, but I will heed your advice…eventually. Old habits die hard:)

Just found a good, lightweight sharing add-on you might want to try called Trackable Sharing. What I like about it is it lets you fully customize buttons, placement, and place non-active (no share count) buttons into excerpts and the homepage to speed up page loads. Check it out on ideafaktory.com. Using it at top of posts.

Still learning about W3TC. I will get around to customizing it as soon as I can. Just happy the main drags on my site have been addressed! Thanks again.

ideafaktory, for a quick getting started guide with W3 Total Cache, check out this page on gtmetrix:

https://gtmetrix.com/wordpress-optimization-guide.html

It also includes a step on installing and using wp smush.it to optimize your images

Thanks Kurt. Reading it now. One thing I noticed is W3TC killed my featured post slider. Deactivating it until I resolve the issue with the settings. Any ideas why? The feature slider is part of the Platform Pro template.

Downloading smush.it. I think its exactly what I was looking for.

If you featured slider is not working then you have probably checked the Minify option in W3TC. Minify is 50/50. It would be impossible to be able to create an all purpose minifier given the infinite possibilities – my hat is still off to Frederick.