Causes problems with CPU?

I could see that happening only a site that has a very large number of posts. Are you trying to create a recipe index for a large volume of posts at once?

To join this conversation, I have my indexes divided into categories but included every recipe on my main recipe index page. That is hundreds of recipes, and the page takes almost a minute to load. I will remove that full list, and I’m guessing this plugin works best with a lot of subcategories to keep the visual indexes small.

https://wearychef.com/recipes

The first time the page loads it will have to process all of the images to the appropriate side. This can be quite server intensive if you are on a shared hosting plan and there are hundreds of images to resize.

This should really only happen once though. Once the page has been loaded once and all of the images resized the page should render much more quickly – or at least as quickly as any page with a lot of images on it. Having hundreds of images on any page will cause load issues unless you take other measures like major commercial sites do.