Wordpress Plugin Reduces Site Performance

[dawngribble]

I've had to uninstall the Hubspot Wordpress Plug-in from my website as it was responsible for a 20% reduction in performance. 

The forms work, but now I no longer have access to the Cookies notification and Live Chat options. Please see the performance reports here Website Performance

[jennysowyrda]

Hi @dawngribble,

As the plugin is a way to install the HubSpot Tracking Code onto all of your WordPress pages, if you believe it is slowing down your site you can install the Tracking Code manually into your pages using the instructions below:

https://knowledge.hubspot.com/articles/kcs_article/reports/install-the-hubspot-tracking-code

Thank you,
Jenny

[dawngribble]

How do I escalate this issue with Hubspot given that website performance is a key SEO and customer experience factor?

[jennysowyrda]

Hi @dawngribble,

The HubSpot scripts only load when the browser is done loading everything else, so while there may be an increase in total time (which of course will happen with any extra data, not just HubSpot Analytics/ScriptLoader), the time taken for the visual aspect of the site to load should not be affected at all. 

If you are experiencing something different than what I am outlining above, the best next step will be to reach out to HubSpot technical Support as they can investigate this matter specific to your portal. If something is not working as expected within your portal, they can adivse on best next steps.

Thank you,
Jenny

[dawngribble]

We're coming up on a year since I first highlighted this issue, when will there be a fix?

[Univoip]

That's really not very re-assuring. While we're ultimately concerned with user experience (site must load quickly) there is another impact of these multiple DNS lookups and why we test with tools like Google PageSpeed Insights and GT Metrix: Site speed impacts our Search Engine Ranking.

https://searchengineland.com/google-speed-update-page-speed-will-become-ranking-factor-mobile-search...

https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2018/01/22/google-speed-update

So, while it could be true the end user may not experience any noticable visual delay, search companies factor page load time in their ranking. All those extra DNS lookups are  significant and adversely affecting your customers' search engine ranking. 

There's still no explanation why you must have all your assets distributed accross so many domains. Your explanation is more of a dismissal than an answer. Good try though.

[jennysowyrda]

Hi @Univoip,

I want to break down your concerns and provide further resources for both questions: 

1. In regards to site speed and SEO, I wanted to share this resource by @wspiro which specifically addresses site speed and performance. 

Please know that while these tools and algorithms will change, we are aways working on making meaningful improvements.

2. In regards to why assets are distributed across multiple domains, the scripts are called by different domains because they are used by different parts of the tool.

All other scripts included by the tracking code are also loaded asynchronously and deferred. track.hubspot.com and forms.hubspot.com are called respectively by analytics when something happens on the page that has already been loaded and is interactive, and forms.hubspot.com is called by popup forms to get all configured popup forms for that portal.

Thank you,

Jenny

[cvps]

Jenny,

The problem expressed still needs to be addressed. Our site performance and metrics have all taken a severe hit with load times going from 1.7 to nearly 9s after integrating Wordpress with Hubspot. The lag is due to the Hubspot as expressed by the other uses in this thread. 

The user experience is severely impacted as the calls to hubspot are causing the interactive elements of the site to not load until after finalizing the api calls to hubspot. Hence the user must wait nearly 10 seconds on a fast connection to interact with the site. 

Further, the article you referenced deals more with hosting on hubspot and not wordpress. 

I hope you can see the urgency in getting this resolved and let us know what the steps are for remedy. 

Thanks!

[kiloj]

Until Hubspot can figure this out. Has anyone found a viable alternative? Subscribing to this thread.

Maybe some other form and pop-up plugin that integrates with Zapier?

Thanks in advance for everyone's hard work in figuring this out and detailing amazing responses. 

[dawngribble]

Sadly to date, I've not found a workaround, it's frustrating as the Hubspot Website Grader gives me a score of 84 and points to the issues with the plug-in being the cause of slow loading. 

When will this be fixed Hubspot?

[SDental]

This is terrible! I cannot believe this has not been addressed. #hubspotreviews this as much as I can about this & hope it get's some love.

[Univoip]

So, in case anyone else comes across this post, there is absolutely no difference in terms of performance between the Hubspot plugin ( Contact Form Builder for WordPress – Conversion Tools by HubSpot ) and the manually inserting code. It produces the same results. 

Hubspot Plugin Enabled

Hubspot Code Manually Inserted

And without either of those options (no Hubspot tracking code at all):

Without Hubspot Code

The trouble is that all the resources for Hubspot to work come from multiple domains with each requiring a DNS lookup for the page to render:

• js.hs-analytics.net: 1 component, 73.5K (24.6K GZip)
• js.hsleadflows.net: 1 component, 364.3K (58.2K GZip)
• js.hs-scripts.com: 1 component, 1.0K (0.5K GZip)
• track.hubspot.com: 1 component, 0.04K
• forms.hubspot.com: 1 component, 3.3K (1.2K GZip)

This is really outrageous. Some of us work very hard to create fully optimized websites. Then we want to use Hubspot and we're punished for it. All our hard work goes out the window. Please fix this.

On behalf of everyone who cares about quality coding, please send this up the chain to your CTO and figure out a way to host all your assets on fewer than 5 different domains/subdomains.