WordPress Optimisation: Control When Plugins Are Loaded

Although, I love the Extended Live Archives plugin and the Archives page it creates, it’s very resource hungry and even though my server is getting better by the day thanks to Matt, it’s still a big drain. I did a quick search on Google and I found this tip for reducing it’s impact on my page speeds, which should work with many other plugins.

One of the issues with WordPress is that it processes all of the code for all active plugins, even if that plugin isn’t used on a particular page. If a particular resource heavy plugin isn’t used on certain pages, then you can tell WordPress not to load it on those pages by wrapping an if statement around the content of each function to check what page is being loaded e.g. with the Extended Live Archives plugin I did the following to tell WordPress only to load the code if the Archives page is being viewed:

function af_ela_function_name() {
if (is_page(’archives’)) {
// function code here
}
}

This has made a huge difference to my page loading speeds, which means I don’t have to ditch a very cool plugin. I’ve applied the same trick to other plugins, including MyAvatars.

All I need now is a way to reduce the impact that using UTW has on my page loading times. Of the 0.8 -1 second quoted in my footer for how long it takes WordPress to do all its queries, 0.4-0.6 of this is down to UTW alone. Anyone got any ideas?

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