Let’s talk about Plugin Performance Monitor from Nexcess.
Usually, performance tends to be one of the most commonly overlooked aspects of building and managing a website. This is especially true for WordPress or CMS users, who prefer to be shielded from the technicalities of running a website.
Performance has never before played such a crucial role in the success of your website. According to a recent update by Google, it now plays a major role in your search engine rankings.
Why? Because Google wants to provide its users with the best experiences possible, not only the most relevant content.
Not to mention the fact that internet users’ expectations are growing by the day for fast and on-demand access. Research shows that up to 53% of visitors abandon a page that takes longer than 3s to load, for example.
In this guide, we’ll introduce you to the Plugin Performance Monitor for WordPress.
Plugin Performance Monitor (PPM) is a plugin for WordPress and Woocommerce by Nexcess. Nexcess is a fully managed, high-performance digital commerce cloud platform for WordPress and WooCommerce.
PPM will run nightly performance audits on your entire WordPress website. These audits log both the performance of your website as well as what changed since the previous audit. It logs plugin and theme changes, such as installing or removing plugins as well as changing configurations.
PPM identifies what changes were made and how they impacted your website’s performance. It then notifies your WordPress website admins so they can investigate and fix any performance issues. Plugin Performance Monitor can show at the file level what’s contributing to the overall request load and delays.
Users can also access the PPM dashboard to see any performance score changes. Instead of just telling admins that their websites are slow, Nexcess directs users to the root of the problem.
This speeds up the process through a level of automation. Website admins no longer have to run manual tests and then go search for potential new performance issues themselves.
Let’s look at a real-world example of how PPM can help monitor and improve WordPress performance.
Log into your WordPress dashboard with PPM installed. You can access the PPM dashboard just like any other plugin by going to “Nexcess -> Plugin Performance Monitor”
Initially you will have to wait for 24 hours before it can show you any score. After that, you’ll be presented with your current performance score and the average page loading times. You can also see the number of changes since the last performance check as well as the number of active plugins.
Below that, you can easily track the change in your performance thanks to the performance timeline:
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So, we can see that we currently have a 98 performance score. While this is great, something must have gone wrong since our score went down from 99 the day before. Plugin Performance Monitor will also indicate the positive or negative change to the right of the score.
Considering that we’ve made 4 changes since the last performance check, it’s reasonable to assume one of them may have impacted the performance.
Under today’s performance, you’ll see “7 insights.” This means Plugin Performance Monitor has 7 suggestions or possible fixes for us to improve our website’s performance.
If we expand this field, we’ll see a list of all the detected issues and possible fixes Plugin Performance Monitor has identified for us:
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As you can see, some of the changes we made introduced significantly more CSS which can take up more loading time. It even picked up changes to the responsiveness of the website and indicates whether issues affect a page or post.
If we change the tab to “Site changes,” we can see exactly which changes occurred since the last performance check. For example, in our case, it involved activating three separate plugins as well as updating our WordPress installation:
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From here, you can click “Manage Plugins” to deactivate plugins and see if it resolves any of the issues.
The third tab we can use is the “Pages performance” tab. This breaks down the change in performance for each page or post on our WordPress website. For example, we can see that the Category archive page takes 1,811ms to load – a 33% increase.
Because it’s the main contributor to page loading times, Plugin Performance Monitor also shows us the change in page weight. In this case, the single post page’s weight went up by 29% to 82kB. In all likelihood, it’s this increase in weight that lead to the slower loading times:
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You can dig further into each of these elements for more information to help you with your troubleshooting.
You can see just how easy it is to track any changes in your website performance and to identify the potential causes. The best part is that it’s just waiting there for you as soon as you log back into your dashboard.
Nexcess announced the PPM plugin as a feature on all Managed WooCommerce and WordPress plans.
Nexcess offers a range of managed WordPress hosting plans for websites at different scales and budgets. You can find a complete breakdown of all their plans here.
The good news is that all plans come with all important features. This includes:
The main difference is the resources you get with each plan, such as the bandwidth, storage, and the number of sites you can host. All plans also come with a 30-day money-back guarantee and the option to subscribe monthly or yearly.
| Spark | Maker | Designer | Builder | Producer | Executive | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Annual price | $190 | $790 | $1090 | $1490 | $2990 | $5490 |
| Monthly price | $19 | $79 | $109 | $149 | $299 | $549 |
| Number of sites | 1 | 5 | 10 | 25 | 50 | 100 |
| Storage | 15 GB | 40 GB | 60 GB | 100 GB | 300 GB | 500 GB |
| Bandwidth | 2TB | 3TB | 4TB | 5TB | 5TB | 10TB |
Here are the step-by-step instructions to sign up with Nexcess and start using the Plugin Performance Monitor:
1. Head over to Nexcess’ pricing plans page.
2. Choose the ideal package for you and click “Get Started.”
3. Create an account by entering your email and password and clicking “Sign up.”
4. Complete your plan purchase by providing your billing and payment details. Then, review the plan information one last time before committing.
5. You can now log in to your Nexcess portal using the account details you created above.
6. From here, go to Plans -> Your Domain Name -> Environment to see your WordPress installation(s).
7. Find the WordPress site you want to log into. Click the three dots menu to the right and then select “Site dashboard.”
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8. The Nexcess plugin should already be installed on your WordPress site. You can then follow the instructions here to install other Nexcess plugins and utilities.
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Hopefully, you now understand the importance of having a fast and reliable website. Not only will it help you satisfy visitors and convert them into customers, but it will help you rank higher in search engines as well.
As you can see, you don’t need to be a developer or have a lot of technical expertise to ensure top-notch performance for your WordPress website. Thanks to Nexcess and Plugin Performance Monitor, tracking and monitoring your website’s performance is a breeze. All you need is a bit of time and the willingness to make the most of your WordPress website.
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