@bighrts – Sorry for the confusion, but generally the slow down has never been linked to our plugin in the way described, but you are correct, deactivating our plugin might solve it which does lead you that direction.
What is actually happening is you created popups and inserted “content” into them. The popup are loaded hidden in the footer of your page until they are opened.
If you didn’t add any targeting rules to your popups then by default they would loaded on all pages of your site.
Bigger still, if the “content” you inserted is media heavy (images, videos, iframes) then those assets are now also loading on every page the popup is targeted to.
You might see where this is going, but 20 empty popups with just our ~70kb of JS/CSS assets loaded would make no noticeable impact on a sites load at all.
So if your site is slowing down you should both check the content inserted is properly targeted to the pages its needed on, and make sure the content itself is optimized well, such as not using full size images etc.
Quick test to prove this concept,
1. mark all popups draft and retest.
2. create new popup and publish with default settings and no content. retest.
If you see no issues now, then the plugin itself is not a factor and you can safely assume it is the content in your popups.
In some cases you might be able to load the content on demand, but if its forms or interactive stuff then it gets very complicated. But if its just images, videos or iframes you can check out our Remote Content or Videos extensions.
Hope that helps.
