I’m wondering if hosting companies use “You have too many plugins” as an excuse for a slow site. I’ve had three different hosts in the past 6 years. The first two were fine, while my third host’s servers are constantly running at 100%! They say it’s because there are too many plugins on my site. What do you think? Do hosting companies blame their servers’ slowdown on its clients’ plugin count to get them off the support ticket line? Or is this simply a legitimate case of an overloaded server?
Do hosting companies use “You have too many plugins” as an excuse for a slow site? Yes, they do–it’s an excuse for any problems or other shortcomings they may have. It affects all hosting companies equally, not just the one you’re having problems with.
As far as I know (that is, in my experience), there is no plugin that will cause a modern PHP-enabled server to “run at 100%”, so it can’t be plugins. It would have to be something else–possibly your site’s content or layout. A slow site doesn’t necessarily mean that you have too many plugins. Refer to this article for details:
The number of active plugins does not affect how fast your site loads. People often believe that more active plugins = longer loading time, but it isn’t so! The reason why active plugins don’t affect the loading speed is because they are all loaded into memory when your website starts up and remain there for as long as your website is running.
Plugins don’t affect website loading time, but the way you use them does. Too many plugins may cause a slow page load because of extra scripts that are loaded. Some plugins ask for various configurations on each page or post they’re installed on–you might have a slider plugin on every page, but only need one. Overloading your website with unnecessary plugins will make it slower!
