Remove Slow WordPress Plugins and Find Faster Alternatives

We all love WordPress plugins and make use of them all the time. They ease our work considerably. But not all plugins are efficient. Some can cause delays, or even damage.Thats why you should be really careful when installing a new plugin on your WordPress site. Sometimes, as much as they can help you, they can also spoil your plans.How to catch slow plugins?Note. The P3 plugin is no longer recommended.Probably the best option out there is P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler), a free plugin that analyzes other plugins and lets you know how fast/slow they are.How to work with P3?Its really simple.  All you need to do is install the plugin, activate it, and click on Scan Now:Important! Remember to deactivate all caching mechanisms that you might have running on your site before starting the scan. Caching alters the way your website and plugins execute code, which has an impact on the performance and makes the scan results skewed.Then, click on Start Scan.The plugin will ask if you want t o go forward with an Auto or Manual scan. Go ahead with Auto. After its done, youll see a chart presenting the loading times of your plugins. You can clearly see which plugins take up the biggest piece of the pie, effectively making your site slower.When a WordPress plugin is slow, look for alternativesIf youve discovered that a certain plugin weighs a lot more than youd wish, you can remove it and start looking for a faster alternative.The first place to go is WordPress.org / Plugins / Search Plugins. There, you can look for various plugin categories and purposes.For instance, I typed in contact form plugins, and a long list of plugins popped up:By the way, you can do the same thing without leaving your WordPress dashboard. Click on Plugins in your dashboard menu, then Add New, and then write  what type  of plugin you are looking for. The same page from WordPress.org will appear right in your admin interface:As you can see, a lot of alternatives are available when it comes to c ontact form plugins (or any other type of plugin, for that matter).Test and compareIm going to do some tests to show you a concrete example of how the whole process can be done.The tests are performed on WordPress version 4.4.2 running  the latest version of the Twenty Fifteen theme.Since we talked about contact form plugins, lets compare:Contact Form 7 probably the most popular on the market,Pirate Forms now WPForms, andContact Bank one of the most reviewed plugins on  WordPress.org.I deactivated all my other plugins and kept only these three to make the test clearer.It seems that Contact Form 7 is the slowest WordPress plugin here, while Pirate Forms and Contact Bank load way quicker.The same goes for SEO pluginsI typed in SEO plugin in the search form, and selected three plugins for my tests. We have:Yoast SEO the most popular WordPress SEO plugin,All in One SEO Pack,  andSEO by Squirrly.And here are the results:Once again, the most popular plugin seems to be the slowes t. In fact, it  occupies half of the entire load time.And thats all to it! This is the way you can test the speed of your current WordPress plugins and replace the ones that are dragging behind.Be honest do you keep your plugins in check and test their load times regularly?Free guide5 Essential Tips to Speed Up Your WordPress SiteReduce your loading time by even 50-80% just by following simple tips.