Hi @rjatcu,
Thank you for sharing your feedback with us. I’m sorry about the delay here and for any frustration caused.
We try to provide as much value as possible to our users by suggesting plugins that we integrate with directly for more reporting features, because a lot of users aren’t aware of them and can benefit greatly.
This is shown within the setup wizard, when clicking Continue while in step 4 of 5 (in the Which website features would you like to enable? page), you’ll be able to see text indicating The following plugins will be installed… if those options are selected.
If you would prefer to not use our suggested plugins, you’ll be able to either deselect them for installation in the Setup Wizard under the Add Recommended Plugins To My Website option, skip that step entirely by clicking on Skip for Now, or if you decide after completing the setup wizard to not use them, you’ll be able to remove them like other WordPress plugins.
MonsterInsights itself aims to add as little overhead as possible on the frontend for your visitors.
We load the Google Analytics script directly from Google because it’s usually cached in your visitors’ browsers, as it’s used on millions of sites. Besides that, our frontend tracking features script is optimized and very specific tracking functionality is only loaded where needed.
On the admin side, our interface is fully built using a modern JavaScript framework that makes it fast to load async without using up a lot of resources.
However, we understand the importance of site performance and in case it helps, we have a guide on how to speed up your site, to help further improve your score here: https://www.monsterinsights.com/speed-up-your-wordpress-site/
We really appreciate you for giving us a try. If you have any further feedback, please let me know and I’ll be happy to forward it to the rest of the team.
Thank you.
