Directorism field guide

WordPress Performance Audit Worksheet

A keyboard-friendly worksheet for diagnosing a slow WordPress directory, marketplace, membership site, or WooCommerce store before anyone changes plugins, caches, scripts, or hosting.

Save your work: this standalone worksheet does not send or store entries. Print to PDF or copy your completed answers into the project record before closing the page.

1. Define the slow journey

Audit owner Site or environmentAudit ownerDate

Record the three slowest business journeys. Name the user, page or action, device, cache state, observed delay, and business outcome at risk.

Journey 1 Conditions and observed problemOutcome at risk and priority (1 = low, 5 = critical)

Journey 2 Conditions and observed problemOutcome at risk and priority (1 = low, 5 = critical)

Journey 3 Conditions and observed problemOutcome at risk and priority (1 = low, 5 = critical)

2. Rank likely bottlenecks

S+ is our first audit on mature, plugin-heavy sites. Measurements from the affected journey still override this default order.

Tier	Likely bottleneck	First evidence
S+	Redundant plugins or overlapping tools	Plugin responsibility and asset map
S	Missing or incorrect page cache	Hit/miss headers and dynamic exclusions
S	Global JavaScript and third parties	Waterfall, Coverage, and long tasks
S	Oversized main/listing media	Main image, dimensions, and transfer size
S	Slow uncached request	Query, hook, API, or transaction profile
A	Background jobs or origin limits	Queues, CPU, memory, workers, and wait time

Baseline evidence and ranked diagnosis

3. Audit plugin ownership

Assign every active plugin or component a business function, scope, measured cost, and decision. Add rows or duplicate this section as needed.

Plugin or component	Business function	Where needed	Measured cost	Decision

4. Fix one layer

Reversible change plan One measured changeEvidence beforeRollback trigger and methodJourneys and functions to retest

5. Verify speed and function

Functional acceptance

Navigation, search, filters, sorting, and maps work. Registration, login, account actions, listings, and forms work where applicable. Booking, cart, checkout, payment, email, and webhooks work where applicable. No cross-user leakage appears in the tested personalized journeys and cache states.

Performance and handoff

The original complaint improved under comparable conditions. Public cacheable pages show verified hits and dynamic exclusions are documented. The change record includes before/after evidence, regression result, and keep/revert decision. Final result and follow-up owner

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