Marcin Dudek Your WordPress site is slow and you suspect a plugin. Here’s how to actually find the culprit – from the manual disable-and-test method to hook profiling tools that show you exactly which callback is eating your page load time.
WP-Cron checks for scheduled tasks on every page load and makes an HTTP request to itself. Here’s why that causes random slowdowns and how to fix it in 5 minutes.
I benchmarked MariaDB 10.11 vs 11.4 on identical WordPress + WooCommerce environments. The results: 40x faster subquery updates, 8x faster date queries, and 4-10% faster page loads. Here are the real numbers.
I installed 16 WooCommerce configurator plugins on a clean site and measured the real page weight impact. Some add zero overhead. One adds 860KB of JavaScript to every product page.
Every guide tells you to increase WP_MEMORY_LIMIT. None of them tell you how to find what’s actually eating your memory. Here’s a diagnostic workflow that gives you real answers.
Your site is down. Visitors see an error page. Revenue is dropping by the minute. Panic sets in. Here is your emergency action plan — a calm, systematic approach to getting your WordPress site back online as fast as possible. Step 1: Confirm the Outage (30 seconds) Before doing anything, verify the site is actually … Read more
Core Web Vitals are Google’s metrics for measuring real-world user experience. They directly impact your search rankings. In 2026, the three metrics that matter are Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Interaction to Next Paint (INP), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Under 2.5 Seconds LCP measures how long it takes for the largest … Read more
WordPress shortcodes have been around since version 2.5. They’re everywhere — page builders use them, contact form plugins use them, even some themes rely on them for basic layout. But do they actually slow down your site? The short answer: shortcodes themselves are nearly free. What’s expensive is the code they execute. Let me show … Read more
Hotjar is one of the most popular behavior analytics tools for WordPress. Heatmaps, session recordings, feedback polls — it gives you visibility into how users actually interact with your site. But every third-party script has a cost, and Hotjar is no exception. Here’s what Hotjar actually loads, how much it impacts performance, and what you … Read more
XML-RPC is a remote procedure call protocol that WordPress has supported since before the REST API existed. It allows external applications to communicate with your WordPress site — but in 2026, it is mostly a liability. What XML-RPC Does XML-RPC (xmlrpc.php) enables remote publishing, pingbacks, and trackbacks. Desktop blogging apps and some mobile apps used … Read more