WooCommerce.com Cuts Load Times 40% by Selectively Loading Plugins Per Request
WooCommerce Engineering published findings showing that loading only request-relevant plugins significantly reduces WordPress bootstrap costs on WooCommerce.com. The team found that unrelated plugins consumed 10–20% of uncached page generation time, and selective loading cut memory use by over 50% on certain endpoints. Request times fell from roughly 800ms to 475ms and 880ms to 550ms on targeted routes, with product pages seeing around a 10% improvement. The approach uses an early MU-plugin that filters WordPress's active plugin list before regular plugins are included, meaning excluded plugins never execute. Several existing WordPress tools such as Plugin Organizer and Freesoul Deactivate Plugins offer similar functionality, though their underlying architectures differ in how and where the selection logic is prepared.
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