Using the WordPress Query Monitor Plugin

What is Query Monitor?

The Query Monitor plugin is a free debugging tool that helps assess the performance of your website. It gives an in-depth analysis of all of the requests being made to the server including database queries, HTTP requests, hooks & actions, and so much more. It can be used to help identify a plugin, script, or database query that is negatively impacting the load time of your website.

Troubleshooting website performance issues can be tricky. If you are experiencing performance issues with your website and have already checked obvious causes, the Query Monitor plugin can help you dig deeper into the functionality of your site to identify problems. Read more about the features and how to use the plugin here: https://github.com/johnbillion/query-monitor/

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Installing the plugin

To install the plugin, log into your WordPress website and navigate to “Plugins”–>”Add New”. A search for “Query Monitor” should return the plugin. Press “Install Now” and then “Activate”.

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How to use the plugin

Once the plugin is activated, you can click on the “Settings” link next to the plugin name to pull up a settings panel. You can use that to set an authentication cookie and see other options that can be added to the wp-config.php file to better control the plugin.

Within your user profile editor, make sure that you have the toolbar enabled:

Now you should see the Query Monitor bar in the toolbar of your site. You can hover over that to select various items to investigate further:

The Overview, for example, will show you the basic page load time and database query time:

Select “Queries” to view a list of all database queries being run for that page and how long it takes to execute each query. In this case, the total number of queries is 3, with a load time of .0015, and the third query took .0007 seconds.

The scripts tab provides an overview of all scripts being loaded by your site:

You can even view details about the particular page template being used:

Check out all of the features of Query Monitor here and take advantage of its many features to better optimize the performance of your website!

When not being actively used, the Query Monitor plugin should be deactivated. Leaving the plugin active can cause performance issues.