The toast overlay is a floating performance panel that appears on every page of your site. It gives you an instant read on how the current page is performing, without opening any tools or running any tests.
Only administrators can see it. Your visitors see nothing.
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What It Shows
The toast displays five key metrics:
Page Load Time
How long the server took to generate the page. This is server-side time only. It doesn’t include how long the browser takes to render things.
- Under 500ms: Good
- 500ms to 1s: Could be better
- Over 1s: Worth investigating
Database Queries
The total number of database queries WordPress ran to build this page, and how long they took combined.
A typical WordPress page runs 20 to 50 queries. If you’re seeing 200+, something is doing more work than it should.
Memory Usage
How much PHP memory this page used. WordPress’s default memory limit is 40MB (256MB in admin). If you’re regularly hitting 80%+ of your limit, you may need to increase it or find out what’s consuming so much.
Top Sources
A visual bar chart showing which plugins, themes, or WordPress core components ran the most queries, ranked by total query time, not just count. A plugin running 5 slow queries can be worse than one running 50 fast ones.
Slow Queries
Any individual query that took longer than 20ms is flagged here. You’ll see the query time and which plugin triggered it. Slow queries are often the single biggest cause of page slowdowns.
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Controlling the Toast
Hiding It Temporarily
- Click the X button: hides the toast and sets a cookie so it stays hidden. It’ll come back when the cookie expires or when you clear cookies.
- Add
?perf=0to any URL: hides the toast for that page load only.
Seeing the Full Query List
Every query, with its SQL and the plugin that generated it, lives on the Debug tab at Tools > Dobsie. Visit Deep Scan once first, then return to Debug for the full list.
(An older ?perf=debug URL used to render this over the top of the page. It was removed, because replacing a page’s output based on a URL parameter is a shape security scanners treat as a backdoor signature, so the same information moved to the Debug tab instead.)
Disabling It Completely
Go to Tools > Dobsie and uncheck Enable performance toast overlay. This turns off the toast entirely: no cookie, no overlay, and no query recording on ordinary page loads. The Deep Scan and Debug tabs still record while you have them open, because that is what you went there for.
Re-enabling It
Same place: Tools > Dobsie, check the box again.
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How It Works (Technically)
The toast uses WordPress’s built-in SAVEQUERIES constant. When enabled, WordPress records every database query along with its execution time and the PHP call stack that triggered it.
Dobsie switches SAVEQUERIES on automatically while the toast is active. It reads the recorded queries at the end of the page load, groups them by plugin source, and renders the overlay.
If the visitor is not an administrator it is never switched on at all, so there is no impact whatsoever. Turning the toast off stops it on ordinary page loads too. The one thing that does not stop is the profiler’s own Deep Scan and Debug tabs, which switch recording on for themselves whatever the toast is set to.
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Tips
- Check the toast on your homepage, a product page, and the admin dashboard: different pages have very different query profiles
- If one plugin dominates the bar chart, visit the Deep Scan tab for a full breakdown of what it’s doing
- Slow queries matter more than query count: 10 queries taking 500ms total is worse than 100 queries taking 50ms total
- The toast times are server-side only: if your page feels slow but the toast shows fast times, the bottleneck is in the browser (large images, heavy JavaScript, etc.)