Southfield-based Nexcess, a digital commerce cloud platform, has released its Plugin Performance Monitor as a feature on all Managed WooCommerce and Managed WordPress plans.
The Nexcess platform is built to optimize WordPress, WooCommerce, and Magento sites and stores.
The Plugin Performance Monitor, a Nexcess exclusive, will capture and compare the performance of a WordPress site before and after plugin or theme changes have been made, the company says.
The monitor runs nightly performance tests on websites and then reports those results to the administrators with insights on what changed and the impacts to performance. It will show users which files are contributing to the load (request volume) and performance (speed/delay). Lastly, for e-commerce stores, it connects performance with revenue growth (or loss).
“Change is where bad things happen,” says Chris Lema, vice president of products and innovation at Nexcess. “Website owners will often add a plugin to their site because they believe it will help in some way. But there’s never been an easy way to understand cause and effect. Which plugins slow a site down? By how much?
“If you’re a site owner without deep technology experience, you may never know if a plugin is making things better or worse, whether or not it has created conflicts or broken something on the site,” Lema continues. “At Nexcess, we watch performance daily. We’re not just telling admins that your site is slow, we’re telling them where to look. It’s a constant feedback loop of the changes they are making. No one else is doing this.”
Included in the cost of the Managed WooCommerce and Managed WordPress Hosting plans, the added feature means that site and store owners can take immediate action to understand performance when shifts occur.
The Nexcess Plugin Performance Monitor runs daily and keeps the performance changes over time, so that customers can see how the changes they’ve made have impacted performance. Customers will be able to open the Nexcess Performance panel in their WordPress dashboard and see performance score changes, and the drivers of those changes.
“We’re passionate about powering the online potential of our SMBs and serving the communities of designers, developers, and agencies who create for businesses around the world,” Lema says. “There hasn’t been a lot of innovation in the managed WordPress and WooCommerce space — so we keep pushing forward. Now with our Plugin Performance Monitor, we want to make sure that fast sites stay fast as our customers add plugins.”
