Hi all, sorry for the ambiguous timeline as we’ve been digging into this. We’ve done many small optimizations that wouldn’t require rebuilding the entire tracking code (very risky) and have seen small speed improvements, though we aren’t where we want to be.
What probably isn’t surprising is we found the biggest reason for the perceived website slowdown is the live chat widget.
If you take a look at this report (this takes two empty websites, one with live chat, one without) we see the full page is loaded in the same amount of time in both scenarios, but the page with the live chat widget takes ~3 more seconds to load the chat widget. So the webpage is already loaded, the extra time is just for the chat widget.
Our chat team is currently working through a laundry list of performance improvements for the chat widget.
We’re being cautious and chipping away at the challenge before we attempt anything invasive or risky that might affect the other HubSpot tools you’re using on your website.
Thanks for your patience and understanding here.
If you’d like to chat about this and provide more feedback, please feel free to reach out to me dkhim[at]hubspot[dot]com
Thanks for the response David. We figured that out sometime ago. We really don’t want to have to implement Drift or similar. The chatbox was one of the features we were looking for when we purchased HubSpot. But the page speed loading is an issue. Is there any hope that a resolution is coming quickly?
Same here. The chatbot was one of the feature for which we purchase hubspot. Turning it off is not what we want when we already pay for it. But the impact on our speed is really big.
I want to add my voice to the chorus to emphasize the importance of resolving this quickly and improve the page speed of our website.
@davidlykhim - Any updates on this? I really cant see any technical reason why you guys need to use so many different domains/subdomains for this.
I am working on optimizing a site right now for a customer, and just by removing the hubspot tracking code the lighthouse score goes up about 20 points. Thats NOT good. I also use hubspot on my own site, and the hubspot scripts really slow things down A LOT, its quite embarassing.
I just wanted to share what we are doing with the live chat while testing HubSpot. We’re not yet a paying customer - likely won’t be until the speed issue is addressed. It’s the only thing holding us back to be honest.
What we’ve done as a work around - is put the chat exclusively on a few pages not throughout the whole site. So we have a FAQ page, CONTACT page and a button that says “live chat” - but takes you to a page where the chat is active.
It has helped - but the rest of the integration is still slowing our site down. We were near perfect (high 90 percent area) for speed - and are down to 80+/- percent pagespeed using hubspot
Love hubspot and what the potential is - but it’s really a deal killer at this point (site speed using the integrations )
Hopefully our workaround will help someone in the meantime.
Our website went from a 99+/- desktop score and 76+/- mobile score to a 54=/- desktop and 22=/- mobile score after integrating with Hubspot. This is simply put unacceptable! This needs to be fixed ASAP. I read through this thread and have seen that this has been ongoing for over 1 year. I really hope they take this seriously and fix this issue.
What exactly do we need to do before the HubSpot development team hears us and actually invests time and effort to fix this issue?
It really seems like we are at the bottom of the totem pole. This is extremely frustrating! I know you are well aware that Google now ranks us based on our page speed and other metrics that your plugin literally drains from our websites.
Is there someone I can call or email directly to discuss this urgent matter?
I was able to talk more with our team and It is important to remember that performance recommendations surfaced in external tools are typically formulated by bots and automated measures to evaluate a site and assign a score or grade.
With that in mind, these scores don’t always replicate the actual visitor’s experience of the page load.
In the case of chat, the widget is designed to not load until the site is fully loaded. That means it won’t impact the speed of the site loading, only the overall time of page load. From the visitor’s perspective, the website is loaded and interactable before the widget loads since these are asynchronous actions.
Tests like Google PSI measure based on total time to load, instead, so they are tracking something different than what the visitor really experiences on the page.
All that said, we absolutely understand users tracking that number and hoping to see improvement. On our end, we need to balance whether we are solving for the page visitor or solving for the test since the two are not always aligned.
We are always investigating ways to improve these numbers and it is on our radar to do further investigation here.
Once I have more information I will continue to update this thread.
@PamCotton - That is true, and thats the reason I have not ditched hubspot. But - the thing is, A LOT of people will just see the page speed score (or similar), without noticing that it really seems worse than it really is, and that makes it a very real problem.
+1
I hv ditched HS plugin due to its bulky and dragging.
But I don’t blame them, as I am using it for free. Similar story happens to Facebook embedded js and Wordpress’ famous Jetpack.
I like hubspot as a CRM, hereby below my way of walking around:
I use Contact Form 7 instead of Hubspot form. Then I use API like zappier to sync CF7 - Google Sheet - Hutspot.
I use Popup Maker to create pop up.
I only deploy Hubspot chat on some critical pages.
Forget about the HS analytics, u will find other alternaive.
The key is: DON’T INSERT THE HS CODE ON EVERY PAGES unless necessary.
Unfortunately, as this issue has still not been resolved (and doesn’t look like it will be any time soon) I will be cancelling my Hubspot accounts and user services that don’t knacker my website.
I would like to apologize for the frustrations, data issues, and business impact this has caused. Also wanted to mention that as much as I am advocating this in my end, our team is currently working on this, and we will be updating this thread as more information comes along.
If you would like to discuss more about your cancelation, your account manager would be able to assist you further with your request.
Thank you for working on this Pam. I to have the same issues. Page loads are terrible on one of my client sites. Uninstall Hubspot - all fixed. Please keep us posted.
Here’s another comment about this… When running GtMetrix, the Yslow score is terrible. One of the highest priority items is to add expires headers. Now I’ve done that but its still a problem because of Hubspot. SEe below results
Until now there is still no concrete timeline on resolving the chatbot issue. Frustrated. It also causing our website image loading twice. I regret recommending HubSpot to our internal team, our clients and our clients as this significant issue hampered the efforts from our development team on optimising the website speed and our clients really think that we are not professional on the web technology.
Thanks for the updates, while we don’t use Wordpress plugins (we use Hubspot CMS).. we also get similiar issues with the analytics code. This is interesting topic. Looking forward to hearing some updates.
Could you maybe explain how you were able to add the chat (tracking code) to an individual page. I can only find how to add it to the footer (i.e. teh whole site), throught the theme editor in Wordpress.
