Loading fewer plugins per request

wildanchor

I just put up this very cool article from WooCommerce.com how they only load up the plugins each request needs: https://developer.woocommerce.com/2026/07/21/selective-plugin-loading/

They claim they can cut memory use by over half by doing this... (We all have this issue - only for small shops with 40 plugins, if not more, each request.)

Mattia

Do you mean if it's something I can do it in one shop without developers team or I'll have to hire a developer to write a must-use plugin?

If this method need development - for me, I cant do it myself so I'd have to hire developer.

Anyway, great idea.

wildanchor

For the time being I think this approach will have to be done at a must-use plugin level, as it isn't a settings checkbox... The decision to load a plugin has to happen before plugins have been loaded.

So the approach described here isnt technically a setting (I.e. The checkbox method) or an options update, but something you can implement if you want it for yourself; as far as I can see.

As an important insight for a shop owner: look at what's loading when someone only does checkout.
So for a small shop I'd just count what's loaded on the checkout request.
Not the idealistic 50% cut as mentioned above, but that's the useful takeaway.

cristianlucaci

I'm wondering, isn't this what page caching plugins already do (in a way) ?

ewoods

Page caching skips the need for PHP when it comes to pages being fetched from cache.

Checkouts and cart requests won't ever be cached so all plugins that are activated are included in this.

This is just the reality of how PHP scripts work when it comes to caching.

N3onc0m3t

I made a quick test and noticed that de-activation of 5 wp_admin relevant plugins dropped checkout first byte response time from about 300 ms to about 200 ms at my shop.

marquezblog

The fastest plugin is the one you delete... 😉

Mattia

The checkout is never cached 😦
I thought (mistakenly) that caching plugin was also caching the checkout 🙂

So perhaps my setup will include fewer plugins, as you said.

Would love to read your experience if you find any. I am curious to see if it will work for me as I was having similar memory and performance issues in WooCommerce with my other WP sites, especially when I load the plugin up front on my home page.
But I should try it.

So thank you for your time in answering. 🙂 I really appreciate. 🙂 You saved me an afternoon of head scratching.