Easy to use.. but places a huge hit on your page load speed

  • I’ve used this plugin for a long time.. but it wasnt until I sent consitent traffic to the website that I realized this plugin was an issue.. it creates multiple callback requests which drags down your page load. I am seeing anywhere from 2-4s loads added to the page load speed.

    Note: even without traffic to the site.. I can still see the calls being made through the wp-admin/admin.ajax.. so no matter what your site is doing every page that loads.. will create many requests, how many? I think that depends on your setup.. but in our logs when we had about 1,000 people on the site.. it generate upwards of 10K requests.. unacceptable. If anyone knows of a better faster performance light Pop over plugin.. please show me the light.

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  • Hi ej2008,

    I am sorry to hear about the trouble you had with the plugin. At the moment, we make one ajax call to record conversions, but that call is made per module / display type, so if you have more than 1 popup, or if you are also using ‘after content’ and ‘slide-in’ display types. We realise that conversion tracking might be something that not all users want so we are adding the ability to turn it on / off per instance. This will be included in the next release.
    I hope we can win you as a user moving forward.

    @ej2008 – (author of another popup plugin here with experience in this issue). Question, how are you measuring page load increases? Here is what I found during my own research.

    Page load scanners now continue the timer well after the page has “loaded”. This actually causes requests such as those ajax ones to be considered part of the page load time, which is inaccurate.

    The truth is that those ajax requests are likely not even triggered until document.ready which literally means the page was loaded completely before they were triggered. Thus page load & speeds are not affected. That is simply a misrepresentation. If you dig though they all tell you this. Pingdom for instance says it was done to account for app like sites that load just the layout & menus, then load content after document.ready. Google analytics is like this. The page loads immediately, but then a spinning loader icon appears until the data is loaded.

    The scanners really should give you the option of what type of site you have and scan accordingly, but they don’t even notify you that this is happening unless you dig.

    That all said generally AJAX & API requests even numbering in the 10s of thousands will not actually cause a noticeable slow down in even the cheapest servers. In fact our API server is a $10/mo platform that has been tested to handle 50k concurrent requests without failing, so other than accounting for the incorrect test data this shouldn’t be a factor on sites with even moderate traffic.

    Hope that helps

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