Perfmatters : Performance WordPress Plugin

Perfmatters : Test & Review On This Performance Plugin

Perfmatters  : You know I attach a lot of importance to the loading time of my sites, and not for nothing 😉

It’s been shown time and time again that visitors go away when load times are too high. For example, this study from Google shows that more than half of mobile visitors abandon their browsing if the page takes longer than 3 seconds to load. And the trend is only getting worse: the more time passes, the more impatient users are for a fast result.

I want the best for my visitors, but this often means using a lot of plugins. And some plugins have the annoying tendency to take juice for nothing. For example, the Contact Form 7 plugin will load a JS file as well as a CSS file on all the pages of your site, even if you only use the plugin on your contact page.

Decreasing the loading time is possible by disabling some plugins on some pages, by tweaking its functions.php file. This solution does the job well for a coder who knows WordPress, but if you want to simplify your life and have concrete results, there is a performance plugin that does the job perfectly, I named: Perfmatters!

 

 

Combined with a caching plugin like WP Rocket, Perfmatters will allow you to optimize your loading times to the max.

 

Here is my basic configuration on Marketersanon:

Perfmatters - Settings
Perfmatters – Settings

You’ll notice that I didn’t activate some options, because they are already in place on the WP Rocket plugin.

 

Perfmatters also allows you to configure a CDN:

Perfmatters - Cdn
Perfmatters – Cdn

The CDN is what will allow you to improve the loading speed of your site in the 4 corners of the world, so that everyone can benefit from it 😉

For my part, I use KeyCDN and I am very satisfied with it. I have also implemented it on my best niche sites for optimal results.

 

It allows you to enable Lazy Load:

Perfmatters - Lazy-Loading
Perfmatters – Lazy-Loading

 

You can even disable some scripts / features on WooCommerce :

Perfmatters - WooCommerce
Perfmatters – WooCommerce

Another section will allow you to configure Analytics :

Perfmatters - Analytics
Perfmatters – Analytics

This call to the Google Analytics script is optimized and will save you a little more loading time.

 

And finally the configuration of the extras :

This Extra section is divided into 5 tabs:

  • General
    • Add code in the header, body or footer
    • Add a blank favicon (prevents a missing favicon)
  • Assets
    • Enable script manager (to enable/disable plugins where you need them)
    • Defer Javascript
    • Include jQuery
    • Exclude from Deferral (some JS files)
    • Delay Javascript (delay until interaction)
  • Preloading
    • Enable Instant Page (prefetch URLs in background)
    • Preload (internal resources: fonts, CSS)
    • Preconnect (external resources)
    • DNS Prefetch : preload DNS requests
  • Database : Database cleanup (auto or manual)
  • Tools : Plugin management

A little parenthesis on DNS Prefetch, this feature will allow you to load faster your external resources, such as :

  • //gstatic.com
  • //fonts.gstatic.com
  • //www.google.com
  • //ajax.googleapis.com
  • //www.google-analytics.com
  • //cdnjs.cloudflare.com
  • //s.w.org

 

The Perfmatters script manager

For each page of your site, you will be able to select precisely the plugins, scripts and styles that will be activated or not.

Perfmatters-Script
Perfmatters-Script

For example, for the Marketersanon homepage, I can disable the search plugin (Ivory Search) as I don’t display the header menu, the Affiliate Coupons deals plugin, the Monarch social sharing plugin, the Contact Form 7 contact plugin, as well as a script from my theme to make the menu responsive.

For each of your important pages, you will be able to customize precisely the scripts and styles called to maximize your loading time. To simplify our lives, Perfmatters has also implemented a function that allows you to apply the deactivation of a plugin/script on the whole site / pages / articles, while having the possibility to make exceptions (including simplified regex).

Now that I’ve introduced you to the plugin, let’s get to the concrete results! I’ll show you below the loading times of the site before and after the installation of the plugin, for the homepage, but also for one article (and not the least): MailPoet, The Newsletter Plugin For WordPress.

In order to make the results as accurate as possible, I’ve done tests with 4 analysis tools: GTMetrix, PageSpeed, Pingdom and WebPageTest.

To recap, here is the comparative table of developments and performance:

 

Time Desktop Time Mobile Evo Desktop Evo Mobile
Before Perfmatters (Home) 1.917 s 7.5 s – –
After Perfmatters (Home) 1.534 s 3.6 s ↘ 20 % ↘ 52
Before Perfmatters (Article) 2.716 s 7.8 s – –
After Perfmatters (Article) 2.63 s 8.1 s ↘ 3.16% 3.84%

 

All in all, we have a very nice progression for the home page and for all the pages that require the call of less scripts and plugins. I voluntarily chose a mega article for this test, which requires the use of most of the plugins, to see if the difference would be so obvious with the home page.

In any case, I find the results very positive, knowing that I had already implemented many optimizations, with :

  • a fast loading theme : Maker Pro
  • the best caching plugin : WPRocket
  • the use of a powerful CDN : KeyCDN
  • the removal of Google Fonts
  • the implementation of optimal plugins
  • calling external JS scripts (CDN)
  • enabling DNS Prefetching for Google services
  • disabling some plugins

Perfmatters is a premium plugin that comes in 3 subscriptions:

  • 1 site: $24.95
  • 3 sites : $54.95
  • unlimited : $124.95

Select A Licence

A fast site impacts as much on user experience, conversion and SEO, so the investment can quickly pay off! For my part, I opted for the unlimited license to be able to implement it on a good twenty sites… to start.

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