Plugin creating an Excessive DOM size on all pages

Hi @europapost

I hope you’re well today and thank you for your question!

The screenshots that you share show that the DOM size is considered too big but they don’t confirm that the Forminator is actually causing “excessive DOM”. Test with switching Forminator on/off will only confirm that Forminator does add-up to DOM size which is expected since it’s actually adding forms and scripts to the site.

I’ve done a simple test on one of my test sites: up to date WordPress with no plugins enabled and only default Twenty Twenty-One theme. The results in PageSpeed Insights:

1. Forminator disabled

– form page (where single simple form would be here if plugin was enabled) – 191 elements
– homepage without form – 620 elements

– audit passed

2. Forminator enabled:

– form page (single simple form) – 308 elements (so 117 more as without plugin)
– homepage without form – 620 elements (same as without plugin)

– audit passed

How many elements it will add to the given site/page, however, depends on how complex are the forms and how many of them are there. The overall size of DOM also depends on theme and other plugins as well.

However, this seems to be related to very specific part of Forminator form actually which is the country list which indeed adds a lot of elements, causing the “child nodes” number to go way above the limit. But that’s something that’s rather hard to avoid if the country list field is expected to be there.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t replicate the behavior of excessive DOM on pages without forms. I see that there are forms on your site in footer and that seem to be from other plugin than Forminator. Could you point me to some page on your site that does contain Forminator form currently then so I could take a look at that and compare it with other pages?

I’d like to check it to, hopefully, see why it also adds all that DOM on pages without the form as I can’t replicate this on my end.

Best regards,
Adam

Hi and thank your quick response!

I have created 2 brand-new pages for your checks:

Page 1 (with form): https://spainru.com/wpmudev-support-1/
5,919 elements
Page 2 (without form): https://spainru.com/wpmudev-support-2/
5,879 elements

You could try to run your checks on these pages, however, I have tried a few different options: from disabling different plugins to trying to test on sub-domain, but if the Forminator plugin is enabled – both speed check tools (Gtmetrix and google PageSpeed Insights) are given the excessive DOM size.

Once Forminator is disabled the issue with DOM disappears…
and 545 elements when Forminator is disabled

Hope you can help me.

Kind Regards
Yurik

Hi @europapost ,

Seems like there are more than one forms present on the page. The forms present inside the hidden Popup Maker popups is the one that’s getting picked in Google Page Speed side. Google would be reading the HTML of the page and hence the hidden popups are also picked up in the scan.

Screenshot at 18:26:10.png

Are those popups meant to be displayed on the shared page URL? I couldn’t find how to load the popup, so I’m assuming they are meant to be loaded in the shared page URL.

Limiting where the popup needs to be loaded would be one workaround. Other than that, you could try disabling or switching to a different “Validation” settings for the “Phone” field and see whether that helps in reducing the DOM size, as that’s one of the main DOM which is picked:

Screenshot at 18:23:16.png

A default contact form only seems to take around 52 DOMs in total, on your page, it’s the hidden popups where the forms added that’s being counted.

I hope this helps in moving forward. Have a nice day ahead.

Best Regards,
Nithin

Hi @europapost

I hope you are doing well and safe!

We haven’t heard from you in a while, I’ll mark this thread as resolved.

Feel free to let us know if you have any additional question or problem.

Best Regards
Patrick Freitas

Hi,

I have done some work around and found out that the issue was caused by bundle use of Forminator and Popup Maker plugins. After removing Popup Maker it has been removed all these DOM elements.

Thank you for support! Keep using your plugin!

Cheers