Works great, but heavy weight!

@rawhasan – huh, it’s interesting you’d say that.

Modula actually has an emphasis on speed (aka: being the fastest gallery plugin on the market).

May I know what issue you’ve run into that made you think Modula is slow?

Thanks!
/Cristian.

@cristianraiber-1

Page with a gallery created with “Tiled gallery carousel without jetpack” plugin – 3.8 MB page weight, 4.80 s loading time, 81 HTTP requests: https://prntscr.com/okb2ue

Page with Modula gallery, same images – 8.4 MB page weight, 8.06 s loading time, 94 HTTP requests: https://prntscr.com/okb46d

Modula is adding 4.6 MB page weight, 13 HTTP requests, and 3.26 s loading time to the page. Tell me about “speed emphasis”!

@rawhasan – assuming this is the URL of your gallery: https://nijhoom.com/bangladesh-tour/bangladesh-travel-packages/glory-of-bangladesh/

I can see that these images are being resized & served over a CDN. . From what I can see, you’re using BunnyCDN. Obviously, this helps tremendously with the page speed. Regarding your observation about page weight, the “Tiled gallery carousel without jetpack” seems to be inserting images that are resized. Could you please let me know the value you’ve set under “image size” in Modula’s gallery settings? I’m pretty sure that setting isn’t correct and that’s why it’s adding up so much weight.

TL;DR version of it: Modula isn’t being set correctly and it’s inserting the un-resized (full-size version) of your images. Hence, the bigger page weight.

I hope this helps clears it up a bit ??

We offer an integration with ShortPixel + StackPath’s CDN through our Modula Speed UP Extension (paid add-on). This helps not only with image optimisation, but it also helps with serving all images from a blazing fast CDN. We’re also working on adding viewport based image resizing to the whole mix.

Cheers,
Cristian.

Hi @cristianraiber-1

No wish to install and check the plug-in again, as did that to answer your first questions. I hope someone else can do that benchmark again if have free time.

Assuming the settings was wrong, what will you say about the 13 additional HTTPS requests made by the plugin? Also why does it not do the correct settings and insert resized images in the first place as the “Tiled gallery carousel without jetpack” does?

@rawhasan – in the age of HTTP/2, the number of HTTP(s) requests is almost irrelevant. As long as these requests are coming from the same domain.

However, you can minimise the number of requests using the fabulous Autoptimize plugin and concatenating static assets (CSS & JS). Modula works OOB with Autoptimize.

Modula offers a higher degree of customisability compared to “Tiled gallery carousel without jetpack”. We offer a LOT more user control and more functionality. Obviously, there’s the tradeoff that once you do that, you also have to rely on the user to make sure he/she gets it right.

I’ve already been thinking about how to improve the UX on our plugin and maybe this is just the kick in the butt I needed to start looking into it.

I’m honestly sorry to hear you weren’t happy with Modula, but I also understand we’re just not there yet where our solution is perfect. We’re still iterating and fixing whatever we can, as fast as we can. I’m happy though that you’ve pointed out a few issues and we’ve already had an internal discussion about setting up a test domain to start measuring the plugin’s performance over each release ??

Thanks for taking the time to write your thoughts as well as to reply here.

All the best,
Cristian.

Hi @cristianraiber-1,

Great to hear that you’ve taken my feedback positively and working to improve it!

Modula is a great plugin I must say – probably the best among the gallery plugins. Its custom layout creation is a great feature for which I’ve tried that. But like all the other gallery plug-in, it slows down the site and not usable from the performance perspective. I’ll rather not use any gallery plug-in which slows down the site. I’ll be the first to purchase a PRO license if you can make it blazing fast – loading resources only on the pages the plugin is used – not sitewide.

A great improvement you can do on the customizer is making the grid size smaller, may be 10 px (or why not 1 px), so there is more control on the image resize. Also can have an option to make a layout template which could be reused in different galleries. Another necessary requirement is having an option to keep the original aspect ratio of the images while resizing on the customizer.

Best wishes for Modula!