Whatever development project you undertake in WordPress, you should expect debugging to be a part of it. You don’t even need to do anything that requires coding knowledge to be pushed into a vortex of bugs and possible causes. Doing something as simple as trying to figure out why a particular page is loading slowly may require you to examine your website performance well below the surface level.
When it comes to checking the performance of plugins, themes or simple functions, using the WordPress Query Monitor may not be essential, but it can be extremely useful. if you are not sure what Query Monitor and how you can start using it, don’t worry.
In this article, we will show you:
Query Monitor is a WordPress plugin that puts some great debugging capabilities at your disposal. It will show you all requests made to your server when you load a page, post or any part of the backend.. With Query Monitor, you can see database queries, AJAX calls, hooks and actions, and many other things going on behind the scenes as you load your website.
Query Monitor, as the name suggests, monitors database queries. It will show you duplicate or incorrect queries or even queries that take too much time. The plugin supports filtering by query type, search function and responsible component, so for example you can only see queries from a particular plugin.. You can also sort queries by rows and time.
And that’s just what it lets you see with queries. For example, with hooks and actions, the plugin allows you to filter by name – for hooks or by component – for actions, as well as listing all hooks and actions fired in the current request. With PHP, the plugin puts the error report in the admin toolbar so you can see if there is a problem. It also gives its components and call stacks to help you troubleshoot. The list of useful things this plugin allows you to do goes on, and the best are explored from the inside..
Since this is a WordPress plugin, you need to install Query Monitor to be able to use it. go on Plugins > Add NewSearch for Query Monitor and install and activate the plugin.
Immediately, you may notice something new in the admin toolbar you see at the top of the website. It now shows you some data metrics, which are page render time, peak memory usage, database query time, and number of queries, in order.
If you hover your cursor over this new area in the toolbar, you’ll see the drop-down menu showing everything Query Monitor has allowed you to monitor.
Clicking the toolbar item or any of the options in the menu will bring up the tool. It opens in the lower half of the screen, just like the Inspect Elements tool does in a browser. Like the browser tool, you will be able to move to the side of the screen using the button in the upper right corner of the tool..
If you clicked the toolbar item and not any of the menu options, the Overview panel is shown. Contains more information about the numbers you see in toolbar items..
You can see this information on any page or post on your website. You can even use an authentication cookie that lets you see the output of the plugin when you’re not logged in, so you can visit your website as a regular visitor.. You can enable authentication cookies from the plugin options where you can set your code editor and see PHP constants that you can use to further control the plugin.
The addon will present its information in several panels and we will review some of the more interesting ones. Obviously the most interesting one is the Queries panel. It includes separate tabs for viewing duplicate queries and listing queries by caller and component. You can also view queries by type, caller, and component using the appropriate filter.
If you want to see the query variables (if any) for the current request, you can view them in the Request panel. It’s also where you can search for request headers, response headers, and related hooks..
The Blocks panel lists the content blocks and associated information, if any. The template panel gives you The template filename used in the page or post you’re viewing, as well as the name of the active theme, template sections, and body classes. If there are any hooks in use, you will be able to see them as well.
Complete list of scripts and filter them by host, dependencies and dependencies, look no further than the scripts panel. You will also see the resources for each script and you will have access to a panel with all the relevant hooks. You’ll notice that there are similar panel styles as well.
Hooks & Actions is the panel where all hooks are listed along with their priorities, actions and components.. You also have filtering options, which is very useful if you want to check for a particular type of hook or hook related to certain components (plugins, theme or WordPress core).
If there are any HTTP API calls or temporary updates, you will see how many of them are in the names of the appropriate panels.. You will also have access to information about them and in case of HTTP API calls you will be able to enumerate them and see the corresponding hooks.
Finally, the Environment panel will give you PHP information including version and memory limit.. You will also see database information, including server version, extension, and host. Information about the WordPress version and server you are using will also be there.
Let’s wrap it up!
Working with WordPress can sometimes mean spending countless hours trying to figure out what makes your website under-performing. Among the many tools you can use to find the possible error, Query Monitor is one of the best. It gives you tons of useful information, but be careful – it doesn’t tell you what to do with it. You’ll have to figure that part out on your own.
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