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10 WordPress Plugins to Stay Away From That Slow Your Site Down BIG TIME!
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It is a fact that visitors to a site want to browse fast and not have to experience long wait times for the page to load. In most cases plugins are the cause of slow load times. So we wanted to give you the top 10 WordPress plugins to stay away from. This post is in no means a plan to tarnish these plugins or those that developed them. We are simply stating that when they are active on your site, they can cause speed performance issues.
Here at WP Fix It, we have a unique Speed Optimization Service here and complete about 100 of them per week. We have come up with the list of WordPress plugins to stay away from based on our extensive experience on speeding sites up and finding plugins that work against that goal.
1. Contact Form 7
This plugin is one of the most popular FREE contact form plugins available but also is the only plugin that by default installs and runs all of its scripts and style sheets on every page of your site. This means that even if a page inside of a site does not have a contact form on it, the plugins still runs all of its assets. This can be changed with some code but not easy to do for the average WordPress user and should be there by default in the plugin or a simple setting to turn on.
Support Article:
http://pagepipe.com/contact-form-7-plugin-causes-global-site-drag/
2. S2 Member
This is a membership plugin and just as a whole, membership plugins have a lot of code because they have a lot of functionality. There are many options out there and S2 Member has been around for awhile and widely used. It is however slow out of the gate and can bog down your page load times drastically.
Support Comments:
https://forums.wpsharks.com/t/how-to-reduce-s2member-slowing-affects-to-our-wordpress-site/1557/4
3. WPML
WPML makes it easy to build multilingual sites and run them provided the site content in different languages. Now the base plugin itself is not too bad but there are tons of extensions you can add onto the base plugin which can really slow things down on your site.
Support Forum Posts:
https://www.google.com/search?q=WPML+slows+down+my+site&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8
4. Revolution Slider
So we would actual love to put every slider plugin out there on this list of 10 WordPress plugins to stay away from. But of course that would be more than 10…;) Slider plugins are just another name for BLOATED CODE. Yes they are cool and a great way to display your content but with this coolness comes speed issues.
Support Article:
https://yoast.com/opinion-on-sliders/
5. SumoMe
Social Media and Marketing experts always say that it is all about building your list right? Yes this is important and for some businesses critical in their success. There are many pop up and content interruption plugins that will display an opt-in form to allow site visitors to enter their email and subscribe to a list. SumoMe is a very popular one and works extremely well. Only draw back is the speed sucking it does.
Support Article:
http://www.oneclicklindsey.com/sumome-review/
6. Yet Another Related Post Plugin
Increasing the amount of interaction and pages a visitor spends time on is a good thing right? Well this plugin will do just that by suggesting related posts for the visitor to visit and doing it in a clean and clever way. But “yet” again this plugin will cause speed performance issues that you really want to stay away from and find an alternative plugin that is zippy.
Support Article:
https://www.webmalama.com/yet-another-related-posts-plugin-yarpp-and-site-slowness/
7. Essential Grid
This an elite premium plugin for displaying content very creatively throughout a site. It is extremely robust with options and can make all your grid content dreams come true. The default settings do not include options that will help speed up its code so you have to take action to make sure it runs speedy. See how at the link below. If you are using this plugin and do not follow these steps it will surely affect the performance of your site and how fast it loads.
Support Article:
https://www.themepunch.com/faq/frontend-grid-loading-optimization-options/
8. Disqus Comment System
The Disqus for WordPress plugin lets site owners and developers easily add Disqus to their sites, replacing the default WordPress comment system. Disqus installs in minutes and imports your existing comments so you don’t lose any. While we like the way this plugin looks and works, it is not worth the massive speed sucking it does to a site. There is however a way to add conditional loading to the plugin to speed it up but this has an adverse effect on SEO.
Support Article:
http://blogpros.com/blog/2016/12/lazy-loading-disqus-seo
9. Broken Link Checker
This plugin will monitor your blog looking for broken links and let you know if any are found. Once installed, the plugin will begin parsing your posts and other content looking for links. Depending on the size of your site this can take anywhere from a few minutes up to an hour or more. When parsing is complete, the plugin will start checking each link to see if it works. This process is very server heavy and can really slows things down.
Support Article:
https://www.shoutmeloud.com/broken-link-checker-wordpress-plugin.html
10. VaultPress
OK this plugin is a bit tricky to explain why it is on the list. This plugin is a real-time backup and security scanning service designed and built by Automattic, the same company that operates (and backs up!) sites on WordPress.com. VaultPress is now powered by Jetpack meaning that you must have Jetpack installed and active on your site in order to use it. Doing this adds another plugin to the active list on the site and means more script and style sheets loaded throughout your site.
Support Article:
https://www.blogaid.net/why-i-yanked-vaultpress-off-my-recommended-list/
Share below any others you find to be SPEED SUCKERS!
25 Comments
I’m getting ready to build a member based site… what plugin do you recommend that users can create/update their own information for an online directory? This is for a membership organization like a chamber of commerce. Something that won’t bog down the speed and works nicely.
We like MemberPress. See it at https://www.memberpress.com/
Wow, thanks for the great list of potential site speed problems. I run some of these on various sites. I’ll do some testing with and without to see just how much speed those plugins may be costing some of my sites. Thanks again!
Our pleasure. Thanks for the support!
Hello! Does the email optin plugin Thrive Leads, slow down sites?
Thank you
Toki
We have not seen this come up directly in our service.
Thrive leads is a good tool in terms of giving you flexibility in creating lead forms. But it has significant impact on site speed.
I had thrive leads plugin and it made my site very slow. I implemented a timed pop-up on my home page and it resulted in uncached load time of 8 seconds, compared to 2 seconds of uncached page load time without the plugin. My site is hosted on GCE with hardly any traffic as I am just getting started so there are no other hosting / traffic related issues.
Stay away from Thrive.
It did for me. I didn’t realize how much until testing it on www.gtmetrix.com. I tried a “before and after” test. It was a noticeable difference.
I checked my site on Pingdom and found SumoMe is slowing down my site, apart from SumoMe another plugin “Download manager” causing the speed problem.
Looking for alternatives.
Hi,
Thank you for the great post about WordPress plugins.
Can you recommend a tool that one can use to test the installation and determine the problematic plugins?
Thanks
Amos
WordFence will scan for plugins that are not supported anymore.
What are you guys doing for the Google update coming in June related to mobile device speed? I understand that this update will impact SERP rankings for mobile. Right now my site speed is 2.5 seconds for mobile devices which is at the top end of recommended ranges. Any suggestions?
Thank you for your question. The new update is focused on Page Experian and Core Web vitals.
Google Page Experience and their Core Web Vitals is made up of the 6 things below. Not all 6 of these have to do with actual speed. Some of them are design and content layout related. Our speed optimization service is speed focused only and will address some of the 6 metrics(the ones that are sped related) below but not the design or content layout items. If you need more clarification on this feel free to reach out at [email protected]
1. First Contentful Paint
2. Speed Index
3. Largest Contentful Paint
4. Time to Interactive
5. Total Blocking Time
6. Cumulative Layout Shift
Thank you for this helpful list. It would be a great follow up article to suggest well-coded, lightweight plugins.
Thanks for the great idea but that list would be several 100s of plugins. Maybe we will put together a list of the top used plugins instead. Will keep you posted.
What do you recommend for contact forms?
There are literally hundreds of WordPress plugins that allow you to build and manage forms on your site. We recommend using an off-site form solution to keep your database clean and not to overload the server. We recommend JotForm.
Wow! Thank you :-)
I disabled Broken Link Checker and it made a massive difference.
Thanks for the post.
AWESOME SAUCE!!! Glad to help.
Hello
What do you recommended for multingual website?
Thank you
Hello
This post below will answer your question perfectly.
https://www.wpbeginner.com/showcase/9-best-translation-plugins-for-wordpress-websites/
As far as membership sites go, WordPress has most of that functionality by default you can setup a user roles plugin and get a basic membership site up in no time.
Great insight here. Thanks Blake!
Great list, ive already moved from contact form 7 to elementor forms as we usually use elementor on most of our sites.
Good idea!