The WordPress Performance Profiling Toolkit We Actually Use
Not a plugin roundup. Four tools that actually found something on a real WordPress VIP network, what each one is blind to, and which symptom sends you to which one.
WordPress & Performance
Core Web Vitals, query optimization, slow-query debugging, caching layers, and other WordPress-specific performance work.
Profiling What Googlebot Actually Sees: A BigQuery Log Deep Dive
Search Console said one site’s average crawl response time was roughly double a near-identical sibling’s. The access logs disagreed — until they were split by bot type, and a cache-busting tracking parameter fell out.
Turning a Debugging Script Into a WP-CLI Profiler
The SAVEQUERIES mu-plugin from the last post left you with a raw log file and a promise to wrap WP-CLI commands around it. Here’s the tool, not just the promise.
When Your Performance Plugin Causes the Regression It’s Supposed to Prevent
A plugin built to delay non-critical JavaScript until user interaction concentrated all of that JavaScript’s cost into exactly the moment interaction responsiveness gets measured.
The LCP Element That Wasn’t Content
Weeks of hero-image optimization went nowhere, because the thing Lighthouse was actually measuring wasn’t the hero image at all — it was a cookie banner’s logo.
One Bot Request Poisoned Our Cache — And Every Real Visitor Got the Broken Page
Ads were randomly missing on one site, with no reproducible pattern anyone could find. The cause was a single automated request with the wrong Accept header, cached and served to everyone after it.
Two More Sitemap Bugs, and How to Fix a Plugin’s Internals Without Forking It
An N+1 query pattern and a pagination batch-size mismatch, both inside a popular SEO plugin’s sitemap code — fixed by swapping internal objects at runtime, not by maintaining a fork.
MySQL Ignored Two Good Indexes: A WordPress Sitemap Performance Deep Dive
A hardcoded USE INDEX hint deep inside Yoast SEO core was sorting tens of thousands of rows the slow way. Here’s how to find a bug like that, fix it without forking the plugin, and ship the fix safely.
Why Your Slow-Query Log Is Lying to You (a Little)
Production slow-query logs only show what happened to run during their capture window. Here’s how to find what they miss — and a measurement mistake that almost shipped a bad fix.