11 Free Alternative WordPress plugins for P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler)

P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler) became everybody’s favorite plugin for a while.  All most everyone in WordPress recommended it, in fact, people ( general novice users) relied so much on measuring WordPress plugin performance, it became the go-to plugin for finding out heavy resource-hungry plugins/themes. For years users, as well as developers, suggested it to people. But P3 Performance profiler has recently become buggy since it hasn’t been updated for more than 2 years. In fact, many users are leaving 1 Star negative review on the wordpress.org review page.  Here’s a little compilation of last month’s negative reviews –

1. Lots of errors – “This plugin has always caused errors at my site.” – Review Link
2. Doesn’t work – trashes site – “Installed and activated with no problems. However, running the first scan resulted in tons of fatal errors. Aborting the scan only lead to the site being broken with fatal errors. Deleted plugin files and don’t plan on looking back.” – Review Link
3. Don’t consider – crashed my site – “Took some effort to get back online. DO NOT USE!!!!!” – Review Link
4. Don’t download – crashes my site – “Crashed my site’s wp-admin page as soon as I hit “activate the plugin.” Was unable to be fixed without deleting the plugin. If your site crashed, head into your FTP, delete the plugin (wp-content/plugins/p3-profiler), and restart your server. Always read plugin reviews.” – Review Link
5. Abandoned, Unsafe to use, and No Longer Functional – “This plugin has not been updated in almost two years. It is clearly abandoned. The code is extremely out of date, and trying to use it on a modern WP site is a no-go. Was much better when it started out, but now we recommend you avoid it in order to protect your site.” – Review Link
6. Great concept, not useful in 4.7.2 – “I don’t know if this plugin is in need of an update, or if I missed a critical configuration step… but in WP 4.7.2 it simply reports that 99.9% of the page-load time was from… “P3 Plugin Profiler” (itself). The 60 other plugins are a thin sliver in the pie chart. Failure to exclude itself from the calculation makes the results useless.” Review Link
7. Doesn’t Work – Trashes Site – “Installed and activated with no problems. However, running the first scan resulted in tons of fatal errors. Aborting the scan only lead to the site being broken with fatal errors. Deleted plugin files and don’t plan on looking back.” – Review Link

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not selecting bad reviews only. If you look at the review list (both 5-star reviews and 1-star reviews) last month the plugin got six to seven 1 star reviews compared to one to two 5 star reviews which is alarming. On top of that, the plugin hasn’t been updated for more than 2 years. On top of that, the plugin doesn’t support PHP 7 as stated by the theme author in –  GitHub Issue, WordPress support thread.  And this is where this blog post comes in. Today we are going to find an alternative to the P3 plugin (Plugin Performance Profiler) that has pretty much similar functionalities.

Before diving into these alternative plugins first we need to list out the functionalities P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler) has. P3 plugin does –

1. Total active plugins and plugins’ page load time per visit
2. Plugin impact on page load time
3. MySQL queries per visit
4. Memory usage
5. The total breakdown of site loading time into – Plugin load time, theme load time, core load time, and also a number of PHP tricks/calls used

An alternative to p3 plugin should have these functionalities or at least some of it.

1. UsageDD

This plugin allows you to monitor the resource usage of your WordPress installation. It doesn’t have any setting page and virtually uses no resources and very lightweight. UsageDD displays –

1. MySQL queries
2. Amount of memory used by the page’s code
3. The time required to generate the page
4. CPU time required to output the entire page
5. In some cases time to the first byte

This information will be displayed at the bottom of your page. And you’ll see something similar –

The number of queries the page is executing, time to load the page, and total memory being used to render the page. The number of queries will give you an idea of whether you are having MySQL problems. The number should ideally be under 50. You will start to see problems if the number is above 75. If it is above 100, you may have an issue with your theme and/or plugins.

2. Plugins Garbage Collector

Plugins Garbage Collector scans your WordPress database and shows the tables beyond core WordPress installation. Some WordPress plugins create and use their own database tables. Those tables are left in your database after plugin deactivation and deletion often. If your blog is more than 1 day old you have some plugins garbage in your WordPress database probably. With the help of this plugin, you can check your database and discover if it is clean or not. Extra columns added to the core WordPress tables could be shown also.

3. Health Check

This plugin will perform a number of checks on your WordPress install to detect common configuration errors and known issues.

•   It currently checks your PHP and MySQL versions,
•  May suggests extensions that are needed or may improve WordPress, and that the WordPress.org services are accessible to you
• The debug section, which allows you to gather information about your WordPress and server configuration that you may easily share with support representatives

WordPress support handbook has a guide using this plugin to troubleshoot WordPress site, You can check out the handbook here – troubleshooting using health checkup.

Health Check plugin has “Troubleshoot Mode” and this mode is essential when trying to identify the cause of an issue, as in most cases, any issue you have will be introduced by your theme or one of your plugins (or maybe even multiple plugins interacting poorly with each other), Overall a good alternative to p3 plugin. Proceed with caution when you are debugging with this plugin, it can break your site.

4. WP Health Checkup

Once installed, there will be a new WP Health page added to the Tools menu and a heart icon to your admin bar if the results of these checks need attention. The plugin currently checks  –

1. WordPress Version: This plugin checks to make sure that your site is using the latest version of WordPress.
2. MySQL or MariaDB Version: This plugin checks to make sure that your server is using a recent version of the database software.
3. PHP Version: This plugin checks to ensure that your server is running a version of PHP that is still receiving security updates.
4. Plugin Updates: This plugin checks to make sure all your plugins are up to date.
5. Inactive Plugins: This will check to ensure that you do not have any inactive plugins.
6. Admin Username: This check ensures that you do not have a user with the username of “admin” on your site.
7. Plugins No Longer Being Supported: This plugin checks to see if you have any plugins installed that are no longer supported by the developer.
8. Plugins With Known Vulnerabilities: This will check your plugins to see if you have a plugin installed with a known vulnerability that has not been fixed.
9. Theme Updates: This plugin checks to make sure all of your themes are up to date.
10. SSL: Checks to see if you have SSL on your site.
11. File Editor: Checks if your site has disabled the file editor.
12. Optional REST API: If you are a developer, this plugin integrates with the REST API. The endpoints can be enabled from the settings tab of the “WP Health” page in the tools menu.

5. Query Monitor

Query Monitor has some advanced features not available in other debugging plugins, including debugging of AJAX calls, REST API requests, redirects, and the ability to narrow down its output by plugin or theme. Query makes it much easier to find out which plugins are using hooks that take more time to load.

Other notable features are –

Database Queries

• Shows all database queries performed on the current request
• Shows affected rows and time for all queries
• Shows notifications for slow queries, duplicate queries, and queries with errors
• Filter queries by query type (SELECT, UPDATE, DELETE, etc)
• Filter queries by component (WordPress core, Plugin X, Plugin Y, theme)
• Filter queries by calling function
• View aggregate query information grouped by component, calling function, and type
• Super advanced: Supports multiple instances of wpdb on one page (more info in the FAQ)

Filtering queries by component or calling function makes it easy to see which plugins, themes, or functions are making the most (or the slowest) database queries.

Hooks

• Shows all hooks fired on the current request, along with hooked actions, their priorities, and their components
• Filter hooks by part of their name
• Filter actions by component (WordPress core, Plugin X, Plugin Y, theme)

Scripts & Styles

• Shows all enqueued scripts and styles on the current request, along with their URL and version
• Shows their dependencies and dependents, and displays an alert for any broken dependencies

REST API

The response from an authenticated WordPress REST API (v2 or later) request will contain various debugging information in its headers, as long as the authenticated user has permission to view Query Monitor’s output.

Currently, this includes PHP errors and some overview information such as memory usage, but this will be built upon in future versions.

Admin Screen

• Shows the correct names for custom column filters and actions on all admin screens that have a listing table
• Shows the state of get_current_screen() and a few variables

Environment Information

• Shows various PHP information such as memory limit and error reporting levels
• Highlights the fact when any of these are overridden at runtime
• Shows various MySQL information, including caching and performance-related configuration
• Highlights the fact when any performance-related configurations are not optimal
• Shows various details about WordPress and the webserver
• Shows version numbers for all the things

6. WP HealthCheck

It detects some useful information regarding your site health, like the number of active transients and autoload options, and then displays them conveniently via the WordPress Dashboard. WP Healthcheck also verifies the software versions in use by your server and maintain information about software minimum requirements up to date in our systems. This allows the plugin to retrieve this information from our external API and compare it versus the ones installed in your server.

WP HealthCheck a very useful tool for managing the transient variables that makes my database and website slow, and also review the mess that plugins could do to your blog(s) when they become old and with a lot of data, WP HealthCheck shines in that area.

7. DP Debug Menu

Not much a P3 plugin alternative but this plugin can show you queries taking place on the current page and the time to load the page. Could be useful in scenarios like – You install a social sharing plugin for your posts and can use this plugin to measure how many queries recently installed plugin(s) are taking. Even though not often updated but still a good plugin to get queries of plugins for page loading time.

8. WordPress Assets manager, dequeue scripts, dequeue styles

A lot of WordPress plugins developers forget performance when creating plugins. This means that a lot of them load self scripts/styles on every single post and or page of your site. This is not good, because it slows your site down. With WP Asset manager, you can choose which scripts and styles should be loaded on the page, and which ones do not. For example –  With Contact Form 7 plugin, With two clicks you can disable it everywhere except for on your contact page.

This plugin took useful functions of other outdated plugins like –  Asset Queue Manager, WP Asset CleanUp (Page Speed Optimizer), Clarify – disable unused features, wp disable, Disabler, Admin Tweaks and combined them into one.

Plugin benefits –

• Decreases number of HTTP requests loaded (important for faster load)
• Reduces the HTML code of the actual page (that’s even better if GZIP compression is enabled)
• Makes source code easier to scan in case you’re a developer and want to search for something
• Remove possible conflicts between plugins/theme (e.g. 2 JavaScript files that are loading from different plugins and they interfere one with another)
• Better performance score if you test your URL on websites such as GTmetrix, PageSpeed Insights, Pingdom Website Speed Test
• Google will love your website more as it would be faster and fast page load is nowadays a factor in search ranking
• Your server access log files (e.g the Apache ones) will be easier to scan and would take less space on your server

Using this plugin means you have an asset manager on steroids. Definitely, a solid tool to debug problems and avoid future pitfalls. Not a solid P3 plugin alternative but the benefits might come in handy for some cases.

9. Clearfy – WordPress optimization plugin

Not necessarily a p3 profiler alternative but more a solution to problems. You’ll get 50+ useful functions for your WordPress website optimization, mixed and packed into only one Clearfy plugin. Like –

1. Code Cleanup from the trash
2. Eliminate the WordPress vulnerabilities;
3. Speed up search engine indexing;
4. Fix another plugin’s bugs;
5. Make your WordPress easier, more convenient, and faster.
6. Disable Unused Styles of Plugins and Themes

Also used useful functions from other popular plugins – We used some useful functions from plugins WP Asset CleanUp (Gonzales), bicycles by falbar, wp disable, easy updates manager, Disabler, Admin Bar Disabler, Cerber Security & Antispam, Admin Tweaks, Autoptimize, Fast Velocity Minify, Minify HTML, Hummingbird Page Speed Optimization, WP Super Minify.

 10. Disk Usage Sunburst

Shows all files in your WordPress in a SunBurst pie chart. You can find the chart in Tools -> Disk Usage, It shows all files (core/themes/plugins/database) of your WordPress installation at once.  Each arc of the chart is either a directory or a file. Move your mouse over an arc to see the size of the file or directory. The bigger the arc is the bigger is the file/directory. Very handy to determine the biggest files in your WordPress installation. Click on an arc to zoom in, and click in the circle to zoom out again.

 11. Plugin Detective – Troubleshooting

We’ve all been there – something’s broken on your site. You’ve looked around the web for advice about what to do and have stumbled across the typical wisdom – deactivate all your plugins and then re-activate them one-by-one, checking your site for the problem after each reactivation. Sure, it works. But who has time for that? Plugin Detective helps you troubleshoot issues on your site quickly and easily to find the cause of a problem. Once the culprit is found, the problem plugin can be quickly deactivated. You can even fix your site when it has the white screen of death (fatal error). You’ll want to have Plugin Detective installed, so if your site crashes from a conflict or bad plugin update, you can get it back up and running quickly!

Conclusion

We hope you find this list of plugins useful, each of these plugins has something to offer as an alternative to the P3 plugin, and I believe you can now find WordPress plugin performance more easily. Did we miss any plugins? Do you have any recommendations? Feel free to let a comment and let everyone know.