Slows down site too much and broke some features

Hi @sweetartistry,

Sorry to read that you’re disappointed with the plugin, especially as a fan of Google services. While you may have noticed a performance difference when using Site Kit, this is usually attributed to adding additional services to your site, in your case using Site Kit to add these services.

An example is adding AdSense or Google Analytics via connecting the respective modules, or by adding services using Google Tag Manager containers, including custom HTML containers or Facebook pixel. These all make network requests to these services, while also requiring JavaScript code to execute. Such network requests can had a trade off with performance, with latency and other factors impacting your performance.

Note that whether you use Site Kit to add these services to your site, or you add these services manually, the same network request will be made. Site Kit doesn’t make any additional network requests or add performance impacting code to a users site upon installing and activating.

If you like I can check your site and see how Site Kit is setup, and see if there is anything I can spot which seems unusual. In order for me to do so please share your Site Health information.

Looking forward to hearing from you. Let me know if you have any questions with the above.

Hi James,

As I said before, I expected some load speed to be negatively affected, but this was just too much. There is no way that it can be acceptable for a plugin to affect a website’s performance this badly. I can see from the other reviews that it is a wide-spread problem and your response seems to be copy-pasted to everyone. Are you even looking in to a solution?

If your plugin is this heavy, why not break it up into 4 or 5 different plugins, each with its own service for people to choose what they want to install. Or at least give people the option of installing only certain services. The plugin doesn’t give the user any choice. It installs everything from the start. For what?

At least give people the option to install only certain services, and/or let them enable/disable certain services. Or split the plugin into multiple plugins. All I wanted was Analytics, I don’t need any of the other fluff, but I wasn’t given any choice upon installation.

I’m definitely not going to share my site information for this when the problem is clearly not isolated to my site. If you are on the developer team for this plugin, you should know how it is set up since the user has no choice in the matter.

Regards

Thanks for your update.

I can see from the other reviews that it is a wide-spread problem and your response seems to be copy-pasted to everyone. Are you even looking in to a solution?

We do take reports of performance very seriously, and we’ve added a guide on the plugin website regarding how Site Kit works with your site when it comes to performance. We’ve added this to help explain how Site Kit works, apologies for not sharing this previously.

We’ve also added a section to the plugin website on the code Site Kit ads to a users site. You’ll notice that if you implement Google Analytics or other services manually, the same code snippets, and same network requests, which can impact performance, apply.

If your plugin is this heavy, why not break it up into 4 or 5 different plugins, each with its own service for people to choose what they want to install. Or at least give people the option of installing only certain services. The plugin doesn’t give the user any choice. It installs everything from the start. For what?

At least give people the option to install only certain services, and/or let them enable/disable certain services. Or split the plugin into multiple plugins. All I wanted was Analytics, I don’t need any of the other fluff, but I wasn’t given any choice upon installation.

Site Kit is a wp-admin operated plugin. If you feel it’s heavy from the administrator panel we cache http responses and perform ongoing testing with the various APIs the plugin connects to.

Users also have the choice to connect any of the available Google services within the plugin. You’ll notice that by installing and connecting Site Kit, without connecting any other services other than Search Console, there is little if any performance impact on a users site, with only a meta tag added to a users source code, and no network requests.

I’m definitely not going to share my site information for this when the problem is clearly not isolated to my site. If you are on the developer team for this plugin, you should know how it is set up since the user has no choice in the matter.

I understand, not a problem. Sorry to hear Site Kit doesn’t suit your needs. I’ll pass your feedback on to the team also.

For clarity, I would like that state that the reviewer isn’t talking about the HTML code that Site Kit outputs on the site but the PHP code that Site Kit uses to get to the point of outputting the HTML code.

Site Kit slows down the site, whether configured to output scripts or not. It’s set up inefficiently and uses outdated programming paradigms. I offered to make it a hundred times faster, but you ignored me. Again, this review is correct in ascertaining the terrible state of this plugin’s performance.