[Plugin: Web Ninja Google Analytics] Slows down WP

I was using it on a multi-site install up until this morning. It slowed down the site to the point that it was keeping it from loading in people’s browsers in addition to keeping me from updating the site via the admin back end.

It’s a great plugin but it is a serious resources hog.

Yes that is true, it slows down so much that it starts overloading server.

I didn’t realize it until today when I decided to solve it.

My research is posted here – Web Ninja Google Analytics Plugin Slows Down Admin Post Listing Page

The delay isn’t due to the plugin but the downloading of data from Google Analytics for your stats. The more traffic you get the more data it has to download. There are a few ways to help it.

1. Only have it display the last 7 days so it’s not downloading data from the last 30 days.
2. Change your “Cache Timeout” in the options. Right now it is set to 60 seconds. That means every minute it is going to download data from Google. Unforunately, there is no way with their API to download partial data. Really, you can only download all the data each time. So, if you set the cache timeout to download every 3600 seconds it will only download the data hourly instead of every minute.
3. Disable the page/post stats. When it downloads the data for post and pages it has to download the data for each page and post. If you have a lot of post or get a lot of traffic this could take a while for the site to download all that data. If you don’t want to wait for the data to download you could disable the stats on the post and page admin pages.

I hope this helps some.