Hi @jjnw, thank you for your honest review. We regret that you had a frustrating experience, however, we are almost sure that it was mostly caused by misconfiguration and could have been resolved if you reached out for support.
wpDataTables is a very feature-rich software, providing lots of advanced functionalities (conditional formatting, advanced filtering, server-side rendering, etc.), and, when used in different combinations, it has to load certain scripts to support the respective features.
However, what we often see is that for some basic use case people enable all the functionalities while not really needing them. It may cause loading additional chunks of JS/CSS that aren’t really needed for the table on the page.
Also, what we often see, is that some of the users are trying to load large tables (e.g. 30 columns, 10000 rows) with wpDataTables, without enabling server-side processing – not realizing that even the data set itself can be a heavy load for network, compared to a high-resolution video, and it also requires processing by the javascript in order to render with all the functionalities (sorting, filtering, etc.).
We have thousands of examples where very large data sets are loaded within a fraction of a second with the server-side processing feature
And for small tables, where it’s only necessary to present some basic data, there’s a separate table type (‘Simple tables’). We have detailed examples and demos of both features on our website.
As you mentioned you have 30+ plugins, it’s not impossible that there is a certain conflict or lag caused by the combination – either within those plugins, or by one of the plugins with wpDataTables. Some basic profiling would easily identify the issue.
As for the deleting there are 2 things there:
- There is a setting in the plugin’s general settings (“Prevent deleting tables in database after deleting the plugin”) that is turned on by default – many users actually don’t want the tables to disappear if they are trying to reinstall the plugin manually.
- Tables with actual data – our users actually asked us not to delete those during plugin deletion as they may need the data elsewhere.
Hope this helps, and I hope you will give the plugin another try. We will be happy to help if you have any issues.
