An automatic and accurate control performance diagnosis algorithm is necessary for general chemical processes with a number of control loops when a performance change occurs. The popular contribution plots for control performance diagnosis have severe smearing effects of diagnosis and the problems are still not solved. A sparse loading based contribution plot is proposed in this paper to enhance the diagnosis performance. A complete iterative optimization procedure related to how to obtain the sparse loadings is developed. A numerical example and a period of practical industrial data are used to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method in comparison with the conventional contribution plots. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.