WordPress performance blame is still too hard.
Scrutoscope is a free, open-source performance profiler for modern WordPress, built by Kurt Payne, author of P3 Profiler. It exists because developers, agencies, and site owners still need a fast way to see which plugin, hook, query, or HTTP call is eating a request.
Why this exists
P3 Profiler helped a lot of WordPress teams answer a painful question: which plugin is making this site slow? Years later, the need is still there, but WordPress is different. Modern sites run more plugins, more AJAX, more REST traffic, more WooCommerce flows, and more background jobs.
Scrutoscope starts from the same practical problem and rebuilds the tool around today's WordPress. It profiles server-side requests, attributes callback time to plugins, themes, core, mu-plugins, and drop-ins, and gives you enough evidence to know where to look next.
The goal is not to sell a monitoring platform. Scrutoscope is read-only, local-first, and free. Background measurement is off by default. Query detail, early boot timing, and sharing are opt-in. If you never share a report, the profiling data stays in your own WordPress database.
What changed since P3
The old answer was mostly per-plugin timing. The modern answer needs the full request shape: hook traces, SQL patterns, HTTP waits, route history, cron runs, autoloaded options, memory movement, and source attribution that separates plugin code from theme, core, and mu-plugin work.
Scrutoscope also adds encrypted report sharing for the cases where the person with the data is not the person doing the fix. Shared reports are encrypted in the browser before upload, and the decryption key stays in the URL fragment. The relay stores ciphertext only.
What it looks like
No install required. The live demo opens an encrypted sample report in your browser, so you can see the request timeline, source attribution, query analysis, and shared-report viewer before installing anything.
