Review of the performance impact of the WP SlimStat Version 3.6.1 plugin on our WordPress website.
After moving several websites to a new server we were looking for a new WordPress statistics plugin to replace the kstats / kstats-reloaded / statpress-visitors plugins we’ve been using.
WP SlimStat is very popular and was updated recently so we decided to give it a try. While the plugin is impressive for its classy presentation and contains the statistical data you expect to find in such a plugin we do have concerns about its apparent negative impact on site performance.
We ran several tests using the PS Profiler plugin which is used to report on the performance of a sites installed plugins. The results from those tests do vary somewhat but all clearly showed that WP SlimStat has a large impact on page loading performance.
In the graphics below you’ll see that the all plugin load time was 0.189s without the SlimStat plugin and 1.734s with it installed. That may be significant enough to be visibly noticeable on the site. Plugin load time jumped to 87.4% with the plugin up from 40.5% without the plugin. MySQL queries jumped to 85 queries with the plugin from 61 queries without.
The site we tested the plugin on does use a lot of resources, so much so that it can exceed it’s host plan limits so we have to minimize overheads.
Performance is relative, for some people / sites it’s an issue and for others not as much. For ourselves, we’ve unfortunately decided to uninstall what is otherwise a cool plugin.
Nah WP SlimStat is fine, the P3 plugin’s automatic test goes to the wp-admin page which hits a bunch of slimstat stuff which artificially boosts the plugin load time for it like you see above. If you go to the detailed timeline tab it shows you plugin load time per page visit.
You can circumvent it entirely by using the manual scan button and also the disable opcode optimize checkbox is enabled by default which messes with the results a little too, not as much as going to the admin page does though.
Remember the plugin was made by GoDaddy, their primary concern for making this was lowering total load on their servers so one of their users going to an admin page with higher CPU usage is important to them but for the actual wordpress site owner it is not.
Hi Maddie,
Thanks for all the info regarding SlimStat.
I do also note that the version now available does not appear to show the high numbers it used to back in 2014 for me.
Regards,
Mike.