I Benchmarked 4,999 WordPress Plugins for Speed. Here Are the Results.

I benchmarked 4,999 WordPress plugins for their exact speed impact. Here are the results. The Setup Each plugin was tested in a clean WordPress environment. Metrics captured: TTFB (Time to First Byte) impact Database queries added per page load Memory usage overhead HTTP requests added No Lighthouse scores. No synthetic tests. Server-side measurement only. The Big Findings WooCommerce scored F The most popular WordPress e-commerce plugin (5M+ active installs) is the heaviest plugin in the entire database. It adds 19 database queries to every single page load - not just product pages. Your blog post, your about page, your contact page - all taxed equally. 86% of plugins are fine 2,357 plugins scored A. Another 1,945 scored A-. That's 86% with negligible performance impact. The popular advice of "fewer plugins = faster site" is wrong. It's not about count. It's about which plugins you install. The 23x page builder gap Elementor adds approximately 47ms to every page load. Beaver Builder a