Recently someone asked for some assistance in speeding up their website, and one of the questions I asked was about the plugins they had installed before I had a look I knew it was excessive.
We are all guilty of it: the explosion of block-based plugins, both free and premium, that need something that isn’t in core. Now, I’ve been trying to reduce this myself for years, sticking as much as possible to core, Kadence, and a few custom block plugins, i.e., code blocks, and my bubble integrator plugin.
This site had at least eight block plugin (Suites) installed and dozens of individual blocks, including multiple video blocks and Presto blocks. Everyone was active and even though some let you only load what you need they where all loaded and ready.
I decided to take a look and installed the find my blocks plugin on the site and set out to see what was actually being used and what could be migrated.
Within about an hour, I had been able to remove all but one of the addons and two specialist blocks and move all video to Presto Player this as well as some caching really made a difference.
Yes, a fair bit of effort was needed to rebuild some of the sections with an alternative block, but this was done quite easily in the grand scheme of things. The site is now not only faster but a lot easier to maintain. There are no clashes with block plugins, and the back end is nippier, too, as you are not loading all the additional blocks.
