estore – reducing the number of plugins installed for improved performance

[mikemorrison]

Hi, I have been looking at the performance of my site recently, and it is clear that less plugins the better. is there anyway for you to offer a single estore product with the addins as standard? (premium version?)

esp for things like gateway and reciept which are increasingly a standard requirement

[wzp]

This should be a good read for you:

http://www.tipsandtricks-hq.com/top-3-common-reasons-for-a-slow-wordpress-site-in-my-experience-4749

Just having an eStore add-on installed does not affect site performance, unless the code related to that specific add-on’s functionality is either invoked or checked for process flow purposes. This effect would be the same, whether or not said functionality was implemented as an add-on or as part of the eStore code base.

Here is an example to give you some perspective.

Scenario 1 – You have 1 plugin that does 5 different things

Scenario 2 – You have 5 plugins that do the exact 5 things as scenario 1

The performance of both the above scenario is exactly the same (because they are both doing the same things and putting the same load on the server).

Here is another example:

Scenario 3 – You have a site with 1 plugin that has 1000 lines of code

Scenario 4 – I have a site with 20 plugins each with 5 lines of code (total 100 lines of code)

Which one is better? It depends on many factors but for a simple example, scenario 4 is going to be better.

It only helps if you actually reduce the amount of code that is running on your server by reducing functionality. Shifting the code from the addons to the main plugin makes no difference because the same functionality/code is running there. This is one of the main reasons why we prefer to keep our plugins as lightweight as possible (sometimes we even sacrifice features to keep the plugin lightweight). So yes less number of plugins is better only if you are actually reducing the code/functionality on the site. Makes sense?

This is why addons are better because you only put the amount of load that you require in terms of functionality. If someone doesn’t need the receipt creator functionality then on his site that code is not present at all which is better.

The practical reasons for requiring users to download the add-ons separately are for software quality control purposes, as well as ensuring that users are properly licensed.

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