Goon – Speed Up Your WordPress Site

Description

PLEASE NOTE With Goon it’s really easy to break your site because essentially you will be blocking parts of the code that normally runs during a typical page request.

We did our best to make the whole process as easy as possible and help with suggestions when something does break.

We’ve also put together several video tutorials to guide you how to get the best results with the filtering.

Goon – selective plugin loading

Speed up WordPress by manually selecting which plugins should be loaded on each page.

Optimizing your WordPress site with Goon is easy and can reduce load times as much as 90%.

Faster page load, faster wp-admin, and faster page editing.

Speed up your site today by loading only the plugins needed for any particular page.

Goon works completely different than any other Page Speed / Site Speed plugin or tool.

Goon does not affect minifying, cache, image load/size or scripts. It works by filtering the plugins and only allowing the necessary plugins for each page to load.

Once installed and configured you will see an instant boost in any optimized page.

Speed up the back-end development environment and speed up the front-end user experience.

Features

• Page size reduction by stripping code from unneeded plugins on each optimized page
• Step-by-Step Wizard for creating Filters, Groups, and Categories
• Custom filters for maximizing user experience
• Boost speed for both backend and frontend pages
• Speed up editing of content
• Instant page speed boost on optimized pages
• Reduction in server load – get great results with even basic shared server accounts
• Works great in combination with a cache plugin (e.g. WP Rocket, WP Fastest Cache, W3 Total Cache), a hosting company that offers packages with server-level caching available (e.g. WordKeeper) or a service like Cloudflare that has page caching enabled.

Pro Features

• Import/Export Filters with their Categories
• Block plugins on all pages except certain endpoints
• Block plugins during Ajax requests
• Identify unused CSS files
• Block CSS and JS files

Screenshots

Installation

1. Install ‘Goon’ plugin
2. Activate the plugin
3. You will be redirected to Goon Dashboard – if at that point something breaks, read the FAQ
4. Go to Goon -> Create Filter and start making filters.

FAQ

When I activate Goon and visit one of it’s pages I get a white screen or an error message

On Goon default pages (all wp-admin pages that were created by our plugin) we are blocking all other plugins.
On some sites, that may cause a problem if the site or a specific plugin is coded poorly.
To solve that, you can go to the Plugins page in wp-admin where you’ll find a new column called Goon.
Ticking a checkbox there would exclude a plugin from any filtering and Goon will not be able to affect whether it’s loaded or not.

My menu gets weird / I can’t find some of my plugins in the menu

If you block a plugin in the wp-admin area, the menu item for that plugin would get removed as well.
Goon is trying to remember all the menu items while none of the plugins are blocked.
That’s what we call “Recreate the menu”.
You can trigger that action from the Admin Bar, but it will get triggered automatically every time a new plugin is enabled or disabled.

I have blocked couple of plugins on one of my front pages and now that page won’t load

You should take a good look at which plugins are you trying to block because some plugins depend on other plugins.
For example, it wouldn’t make sense to block WooCommerce on a certain page and not block WooCommerce Bookings too, since that plugin can’t operate without the first one.
In some cases a plugin with a dependency will not recognize that it’s dependency plugin is blocked and it will try to load itself anyway causing Fatal Errors.

Reviews

Clean and intuitive UI

Hudson Atwell July 19, 2024

Thanks! Great concept, great execution!

WOW! My new must have plugin for speedy sites.

Alauddin April 18, 2022 1 reply

I really like the filter UI to disable plugins per page (endpoint). The grouping functionality is nice to streamline the process and the widget showing memory used or optimized is helpful and gratifying. For a brand new plugin this is already amazing and I recommend anyone serious about website performance to grab the pro version.

Review from the author

Goon Team March 20, 2022

I’ve used this plugin in dozens of sites and the best result came from those sites that had 50+ active plugins. One of them was only few active plugins shy of 100! The speed improvement was amazing. On certain pages, it was possible to exclude all but 2-3 necessary plugins which resulted with loading speed improvement of up to 90%. The plugin was developed out of a necessity during one of those projects where I had no influence on the number of plugins that were going to be used. Pretty soon it became obvious that many plugins were not coded with best practices in mind and they were loading their resources on pages where they were not used at all (and were never supposed to). With Goon, it finally became possible to manually select which plugins will be loaded where and that produced 2 great things, one of them being reduced server load which instantly meant cost reduction – it was no longer necessary to pay for the highest tier of the hosting plan for that project, the website worked faster than before even on one of the lower tiers. The next big thing we’ve noticed was that Google has positioned the most important pages of that (e-commerce) site closer to the top of the first page of the search results. Since the company I’ve developed the plugin for was already well established and their pages were well aged, moving up with their ranking positions resulted in higher income because they got more user traffic flowing in. For that company, it was a significant jump from an average of several hundreds of thousands of US$ to record breaking income of 1.8 millions, and that happened during a month that was usually one of the slowest ones in a year being outside their main season. I hope Goon can produce similar results for your websites too! Whether you’ll end up earning more money with a big e-commerce system or you’ll just save yourself few seconds of waiting time while refreshing a page during creative process on your personal blog that very few people read – my goal will be achieved. I wish you the best of luck in your optimization efforts

Contributors & Developers

Changelog

1.2.9.2

Release Date – 15 February 2024
* Updated: Freemius version 2.6.2

1.2.9.1

Release Date – 15 August 2022
* Updated: Freemius version 2.4.5

1.2.1

Release Date – 15 August 2022
* Fixed: The CPTs created by Goon won’t appear in the search results anymore
* Added: The Ability to combine “is” and “is not” as a set of rules in the Endpoints filter type

1.2.8

Release Date – 27 April 2022
* Updated: The logic that checks the current endpoint
Pro version
* Added: The “Endpoint(s) Excluded” filter trigger

1.2.7

Release Date – 19 March 2022
* Added: The “Get unused CSS files” button
* Updated: The Overview page
* Fixed: Freemius activation issue with menu recreation

1.2.6

Release Date – 19 March 2022
* Updated: The wildcards use in endpoint and ajax action matching

1.2.5

Release Date – 1 March 2022
* Updated: Freemius SDK version
* Updated: Removed some legacy code

1.2.4

Release Date – 29 January 2022
* Added: Request loading time metric
* Fixed: The Admin Bar menu rearranged
Pro version
* Added: Ability to export filters

1.2.3

Release Date – January 2022
* Fixed: Adminbar lists of blocked/running plugins is now scrollable if too long
Pro version
* Added: Ability to block CSS and JS files

1.2.2

Release Date – October 2021
* Added the ability to exclude the plugins from Goon

1.2.1

Release Date – October 2021
* Tightening the security

1.2.0

Release Date – October 2021
* Logo has changed
Pro version
* Added: Ability to filter Ajax calls

1.1.0

Release Date – October 2021
* Plugin adopted under a new name – Goon!

1.0.8

Release Date – April 2021
* Included the Overview page
* Integrated with the Premium plugin

1.0.7

Release Date – April 2021
* Bugfixes and UI polishing

1.0.6

Release Date – March 2021
* The MU plugin will always be the same version as the main file
* Goon now works with WordPress in a subfolder
* View Details on the Plugins page fixed

1.0.5

Release Date – March 2021
* The MU plugin will get updated on any plugin update
* The View Details screen on the Plugins page got fixed

1.0.4

Release Date – March 2021
* Auto Menu Update Fixed
* Overview and walkthrough added
* Other minor tweeks to the code

1.0.3

Release Date – March 2021
* Initial version