WP-CLI Profiling Commands

← Back to WP-CLI

WP-CLI Profiling Commands

Profiling commands measure exactly how long WordPress spends in each phase of a request — bootstrap, main query, template — and how much of that time is core versus your own hooked code. The fastest way to turn “the site feels slow” into one concrete number, before you touch a single line of code.

wp-cli-profiling — bash

Commands

wp package install wp-cli/profile-command

Installs the profiling command — not bundled with WP-CLI core.

Plaintext
wp package install wp-cli/profile-command

One-time setup per environment. Every command below is unavailable until this package is installed. Verify with wp profile --help.

wp profile stage

Profiles all three request stages side by side: bootstrap, main_query, template.

Plaintext
wp profile stage --url=example.com

The first command to run on any “site feels slow” ticket. On a multisite network, always pass --url — without it you profile the network’s main site, not the one anyone actually complained about.

wp profile stage <stage>

Isolates a single stage and shows its hook_time — how much of that stage ran in hooked plugin/theme code versus WordPress core.

Plaintext
wp profile stage template --url=example.com

A high hook_time relative to a stage’s total time means the cost is in what’s hooked onto that stage, not in WordPress core or the theme’s own template files.

wp profile hook

Breaks a single hook down by registered callback.

Plaintext
wp profile hook template_redirect --url=example.com

The step after wp profile stage flags a stage as slow — this names the exact plugin function or callback responsible, instead of guessing which of ten active plugins is at fault.

wp profile eval

Benchmarks a raw PHP snippet, no full request required.

Plaintext
wp profile eval "sleep(1);"

Useful for isolating whether one specific function call is the cost, before deciding it’s worth wiring into a full page request.

wp profile eval-file

Same as wp profile eval, reading the snippet from a file.

Plaintext
wp profile eval-file bench.php

Easier than eval for anything longer than one line — keep a small folder of benchmark snippets per project instead of retyping them in the terminal.

Common Workflows

Triage a “site is slow” ticket

Plaintext
wp profile stage --url=example.com
wp profile stage template --url=example.com
wp profile hook template_redirect --url=example.com

Find the slow stage, isolate it to check hook_time, then drill into the specific hook. Three commands, no guessing, no plugin installed in production.

Confirm a fix actually worked

Plaintext
wp profile stage --url=example.com

Run once before the fix, once after. “It feels faster” is not a number — a repeated wp profile stage is.

Benchmark a snippet before shipping it

Plaintext
wp profile eval-file candidate-function.php

Test a function’s cost in isolation before it goes into a hook that runs on every request.

Notes on Reading wp profile Output

time — how long the stage actually took, in seconds. The number everyone asks for first, and the least useful one on its own.

query_num — how many SQL queries ran during that stage. High and rising across releases is worth tracking even before it becomes a visible slowdown.

cache_ratio — the share of queries served from the object cache instead of the database. Low cache_ratio on a site that should have Redis or Memcached usually means the persistent cache isn’t actually connected — check with wp cache type.

hook_time — only shown when profiling a single stage. How much of that stage’s time ran inside hooked plugin/theme callbacks, versus WordPress core itself. This is the column that tells you where to actually look.

Related Command Groups

  • Core — bootstrap loads every active plugin and the theme, same code path wp core commands touch
  • Plugins — a heavy plugin on init is the most common cause of a slow bootstrap
  • Database — main_query and cache_ratio both depend on database and index health
  • Cache — a low cache_ratio often just means the persistent object cache isn’t connected

Practice Cases