These are the plugins testet:

• Flickr Manager 2.0.2 by Trent Gardner
• Flickr Photo Gallery 0.96 by Joe Tan
• flickrRSS 4.0 by Dave Kellam
• Flickr Tag 2.2.4 by Jeff Maki
• NextGEN Gallery 0.95 by the NextGEN DEV-Team
• SimpleFlickr 3.0 by Josh Gerdes
• Wordpress Media Flickr 1.0.3 by yu-ji
• WP-Highslide 1.28 by Jesse Heap
• Post Thumb Revisited 2.3 by Alakhnor
• FAlbum 0.7.1 by Elija Cornell
• Wordpress Imager 0.9.5 by Alexander Beutl.

As you can see, some plugins behave and take no unnecessary overhead when not in use, while others add to the pageload no matter if they are in use or not. Also, since these plugins are all image related, the size of the images themself are of course added to this when in use!

Head on over and read for yourself!

NOTE! Just noticed that part 3 of his testing css article series is out. Check it out.

There is one big difference though.. PHP Speedy works!

I timed the average load time of my blog page with, and without, the plugin activated. Here are the results:

As you can see the default settings didn’t work too well with me. But then again. I only have a small css file, and no javascript. Given a “heavier” site I think the default settings would work better. But as you see when I tweaked to settings a bit you see the plugin doing it’s job! Well done!

I first timed the loading of the post with the plugin turned off. The average loadtime was 1.18s. I then timed it with the plugin turned on, and after clicking the show all link, thus showing all 12 comments. This time the average loadtime was 1.2s. Not much difference, but a slight increase in loadtime as was expected.

Now I timed the page with only 10 comments showing, and this time the average loadtime was 1.09s. I also timed the page with only the 2 remaining comments showing and got an average loadtime of 1.03s.

So it seems you can indeed decrease the loadtime of the post by limiting the comments.

Note that this test was done on a fresh install of WordPress, and the 12 comments used were just short ones. I would love for someone to do a similar test on a post with ALOT of (long) comments. If you do, let me know!

The plugins where you could build your own forms all came with a default form, with the exception of FormBuilder. Before I could test this plugin I created a simple contact me form. cformsII lets you turn on/off ajax feature on the forms, but I couldn’t detect any difference in loadtime either way.

The tests where all done on a fresh install of WordPress, using Firefox and Firebug.

The plugins I decided to test are:

• WP_ContactMe 1.0.1 by DCoda Ltf
• WP-ContactForm 1.5 by Ryan Duff and Peter Westwood
• SimpleModal Contact Form (SMCF) 1.1.3 by Eric Martin
• FormBuilder 0.57 by TruthMedia Internet Group
• Contact Form 7 1.7.7 by Takayuki Miyoshi
• cformsII 8.4 by Oliver Seidel

Note! The SimpleModal Contact Form (SMCF) required me change my theme, so I decided to drop it from the test, as all others are “Plug-and-play”.

UPDATE! After checking the installation instructions for SMCF it seems you can indeed insert this form without altering any themes. You just have to create a post or a page, and enter a link with a certain class. This link will then open the contact form.  The average loadtime of SMCF can therefor be a bit inaccurate since it was taken on different day than the rest. But as you can see, it is the fastest of the javascript-using plugins

Conclusion
If you just want a simple form for your readers to contact you, you are better off with either WP_ContactMe or WP-ContactForm. But if you want to be able to customize your own forms, cformsII is the “fastest” of them.

I quickly found out that there are quite alot of these plugins. Most of them just inserts a list of icons at the bottom of your post or page.  There are also some that comes as a widget, and some that is linked to an external site, such as ShareThis. But it is the ones that inserts icons on your page or post that I’m testing today.

The test was done on a fresh install of WordPress with no other plugins activated. I used Firefox and Firebug to do the speedtesting. The plugins were configured to show 5 icons each, with the exception of Slashdigglicious and SocialList which don’t let you choose which sites you want to show, and ob-textonly-social-bookmarker which is text only.

The testet plugins are:

1. Bookmarkify 0.9.1 by Gary Keorkunian
2. Bookmark Me 1.1.4 by Satollo
3. ob-textonly-social-bookmarker 2.0 by Rajender Singh
4. obsocialbookmarker 5.3.3 by Rajender Singh
5. Slashdigglicious 1.0.5 by Robert Tsai
6. Sociable 2.6.5 by Joost de Valk
7. Social Bookmarking RELOADED 2.9 by Valent
8. Social Bookmarks 4.0.65 by Apostolos Dountsis
9. SocialList 1.5 by Codemaster
10. SociBook 0.8 by Erik Sefkow
11. TimesURL.at Sociable Plugin 1.4 by Justin Hartman

Notes! The load times are average of 5 page refreshes. The Sociable plugin let’s you use the plugin without a CSS file, this shaves off some milliseconds.  Remember, this test is done with pageload in mind, so ease of use, options etc is not taken into account.

Conclusion
There are two plugins that stand out here. And that is Bookmarkify and SociBook, they both have average pageloads of under 1 second. Ob-textonly-sociable-bookmarker also loads under 1 second, but this plugin uses no images. But overall, all the plugins are reasonable fast to load, with the exception of obsocialbookmarker with an average pageload of almost 6 seconds, due to the use of loads of javascript!

This is the results:

Photo from flickr
Average loading time: 1.32s

Photo from Media Library
Average loading time: 1.39s

Not much difference there. The test was done on a fresh install of Wordpress with no plugins installed. Firefox and Firebug was used in the speedtest.

This test was done on a slower internet access than the first one, so it’s no use comparing the numbers from the two tests. The test is done on a fresh install of Wordpress, using Firefox with Firebug.

The plugins in question are

• Google Analyticator 2.12 by Ronald Heft, Jr.
• Google Analytics for Wordpress 2.5.3 by Joost de Valk
• WP Google Analytics 1.1.0 by Aaron D. Campbell

As you can see the results for WP Google Analytics is not as great as the first test. If this is because the new version or something else, I can’t say. Remember also that it is only the speed of opening the page with the plugins activated that is taken into account in this test.

Note
The WP Google Analytics plugin inserts the javascript in the footer. The Google Analytics for Wordpress plugin inserts it in the header, and Google Analyticator let’s you choose betweeen the footer and the header (Default is footer).

• Google Analyticator 2.12
• Google Analytics for Wordpress 2.5.3
• WP Google Analytics 1.0.0

The test was done on a fresh install of WordPress, with the default theme and on the index page. I used Firefox with Firebug for the testing. I did 5 refreshes of the page.

Conclusion
WP Google Analytics is the winner!