Quick Start Guide

Super Speedy Performance Analysis finds out what is actually slowing your WordPress or WooCommerce site down – and names the plugin responsible, with evidence.

Install

1. Download the latest zip from https://github.com/superspeedyplugins/super-speedy-performance-analysis/releases/latest
2. Plugins -> Add New -> Upload Plugin -> activate.
3. Go to Super Speedy -> Performance Analysis.

On activation the plugin installs two small helpers: an mu-plugin loader and a conditional db.php drop-in. Both are inert for normal traffic – they only wake up for the plugin’s own signed profiling requests – and both are removed automatically when you deactivate the plugin. The Overview tab’s Health box shows their status.

Your first analysis

Click Run Analysis. The plugin visits your key pages roughly four times each: home, shop, product pages, archives, search, checkout, and the wp-admin screens you use daily. It measures page generation time, SQL time, query counts, rows fetched and peak RAM, and attributes every query to the plugin or theme that ran it.

The first run is read-only and non-destructive. It creates no content, sends no emails, and changes nothing about your site. It does consume server resources while it runs, so on a busy production site pick a quieter moment.

When it finishes you get a site score and the Top Insights – plain-English findings like “plugin-x ran 70 queries on home” – each with a recommendation. Understanding Your Results explains what each finding type means and how to read the score.

What next

• Pages tab: click any row for a per-plugin breakdown and the slowest queries.
• Plugins tab: per-plugin totals, plus a Measure button per plugin – a targeted sweep proving that one plugin’s real cost (or saving) on every page.
• Run Plugin Impact Analysis: the one-button sweep, in two phases. Phase 1 quickly screens every eligible plugin on its busiest pages; phase 2 automatically gives only the plugins that showed a measurable impact the full treatment – every page, plus object-cache-disabled and cache-priming measurements when you have Redis/Memcached. Start it, walk away, and the floating monitor shows where it is up to and roughly how long the current phase has left whenever you come back.
• Function-level detail: install the free excimer extension and every profile gains a by-function breakdown. See Installing the Optional Profiling Extras and Function-Level Profiling.
• History tab: re-run monthly – if your site is getting slower as it grows, this is where you see it.

Things that trip people up

• A speed plugin showing lots of SQL is not necessarily slow. Attribution credits queries to whoever runs them, so a plugin that replaces a slow feature (search, filters) shows the work it does instead of the slower native code. Use its Measure button – “saves Xms” (green) means it is making your site faster.
• Pages/Plugins tabs always show your last full analysis (or spot check). Deep and Cache Impact runs add their results to the Plugins tab’s “Measured impact” and “Object cache” columns; they do not replace the page profiles.
• Progress lives in the floating monitor (bottom right), visible on every tab and minimisable. It resumes automatically after a reload or when you come back later, and shows the plugin/page/cache-mode being tested plus elapsed time and time remaining. Keeping the browser tab open (minimised is fine) drives the run fastest; with it closed, WP-Cron continues the run in the background as your site receives traffic.
• A run stuck mid-way cleans itself up: staleness is judged by progress, so a wedged run is re-kicked after 30 minutes and only failed after 3 hours without any progress – an hours-long plugin impact run is never killed just for being long. Any held db.php/object-cache.php drop-in is restored on finish, cancel or failure. You can also click Cancel at any time – restoration is immediate.

Further reading