Be warned, this widget works well, but it is a resource hog…

Recently I was performing a few profiling scans on my website, to try to figure out what are the bottlenecks — my goal is to get the home page to load under 6 seconds (without cache). This seems to be an unachievable goal, but I used to have it taking half a minute or sometimes more, so I’ve not given up hopes in extracting a bit more performance out of the system…

Now imagine my shock and surprise when I found out that 10-15% of the load time and overall resource consumption was being taken by the About.me Widget plugin! Oh wow! That was completely unexpected!

Removing the plugin and simply relying on the embeddable version using JS, which you can drop on any Text widget, will get you precisely the same effect as the widget — but have no performance cost whatsoever. When I did that and removed the About.me Widget plugin, page loading time dropped from 9.6 seconds to 6.7 — a vast improvement!

I’m shocked at how such a simple plugin like this can have that performance impact. So, be wary. If you have plenty of resources to spare, you might never have noticed any difference. If, like me, you’re running on a very tight environment, with little resources left, and every bit of performance counts, then get rid of the plugin and just use the embedded JS technique… the performance hit is simply not worth it.