Heavily slows down site (if not set up properly)

@mkmllr – Sorry to hear that, but it sounds like you had some setup issues.

1. Appears you didn’t add any conditions to your popups. Conditions control where each popup is loaded. If you only need Popup A on page b, then conditions are how you achieve this.

2. Our JS cannot block rendering of the page. 100% of our JS is loaded using defer which tells the browser to not even load and process our code until the page has fully loaded. You can read more here: https://www.w3schools.com/tags/att_script_defer.asp

3. Depending on how you are testing page load speeds, you may simply be getting inaccurate information. To clarify sites like pingdom that do page speed testing all made changes in the last year, most of them without notifying people of how it actually works now. So here is the details on that process. They do not stop the timers when the page finishes loading. The timers continue to run up to 30 seconds after the page officially loads. They do this because of sites such as Google Analytics where the page initially loads, but content is loaded via AJAX after its loaded. But this change also causes false high load times when any plugin uses deferred loading or ajax requests after the page loaded. Our plugin does both, deferring JS and an ajax request if a popup opens.

Because of the silent changes they made it appears your page load times are up, but in fact our code cannot & won’t run until the page has already loaded. Thus its innacurate representation.

All in all the issues you described can all be solved with little to no effort on your part, and the extra load time needs to be looked at with some discretion.

Additional notes:
– The only thing we do that can affect actual page load time would be in our queries, which are limited to 2 and have been heavily optimized.
– Your popups content can also be part of the problem. If you load videos for instance in the popups, the browser loads them whether the popup opens or not. This is not something specific to popups, if you inserted that same content on the page it would still increase loads. Now consider this if you don’t apply conditions, now all your popups content is adding up.
– If you are running a lot of content in popups we have other solutions that may work better such as Remote Content or even Popup Videos extensions.

All in all it sounds like you should be able to resolve it quickly. Hope you will reconsider your review & rating once the facts have been reviewed.

Either way thanks for the valuable feedback. Hope I have alleviated some of your concerns here.

@danieliser – After reading your reply, I gave it another shot.

1. I indeed didn’t set up any conditions, that’s on me. So I went ahead and added conditions – much better now! One problem though: I wanted to select pages where the pop-up should appear using the Pages: Selected condition option, but when I started typing, the dropdown only listed my posts instead of pages, which forced me to manually find all the page IDs for ~15 pop-ups in 3 different languages, which was tedious.

2. The blocking was due to the CF7 recaptcha scripts. Each pop-up contains a contact form with a recaptcha and when I hadn’t set any conditions it would load all of them on every page, making tons of requests and delaying the rendering.

3. I was testing page speed using the browsers built in dev-tools which gave accurate results. The site now runs fine at ~1 sec page load on pages without a pop-up. On pages containing multiple pop-ups it takes a bit longer but that’s fine. Maybe I’ll try to make them more dynamic in the future where there is similar content.

Depending on the content of the pop-ups, one really has to take the time to set things up properly, which may not be very clear at first. I’ll continue using your plugin and have bumped up the review. Thanks for taking your time to reply.

@mkmllr – Very much appreciate you giving it another shot, happy to help work out the remaining issues.

1. Just to confirm, you did select Page Selected, there is a %TYPE% Selected option for every public post type, so the Posts Selected field should only search post post types, and same for pages. If that is not what you are seeing, there are a few possibilities right of the bat: do you have any plugins that modify search behaviors? If so they may be interfering in the queries. If that isn’t it there must be some other underlying issue occurring as we haven’t seen any reports of this type of thing and this feature has remained unchanged since v1.4 ~1 year ago.

2. If you have multiple of the same / similar form, maybe a dynamic solution is the way to go (not using remote content as forms don’t generally work well because they are not built to be loaded that way, limitation of the forms themselves, not something we can address).

You could for instance have a hidden field and set the value based on the current page, clicked button etc when the popup opens.

3. Awesome, yea often we get this complaint, but as you found out, it is typically the content our users (like you) have inserted that cause the bulk of the issue. We try to account for this in various situations like popular form plugins, and some page builders, but its impossible for every type of content. The best thing we can do is help best we can to solve them & educate.

Also most modern browsers in the page speed tab offer filters for page load time vs the content loaded after page has finished loading, something the speed tests should really offer as well :).

Let me know if I can be of further help. Also would love your feedback on how you think we could address any of the issues you experienced or better educate users as they get started. Definitely something we want to resolve somehow in the future.