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

[JSwystun]

Hi Hubspot,

Quite a disheartening thread. I imagine that if you haven't yet seen debilitating churn because of this, you soon will.

I've implemented Hubspot at our own organization and a number of our client's. Five years ago, Hubspot was revolutionary. Since then, what has Hubspot done? You've grown the tool to the point of feature bloat. You've bled into turning the tool into a jack of all trades (and master of none). You've raised prices and changed subscription structure (my bills recently nearly tripled in size with no warning).

Today I had the last straw. For the umpteenth time I've tried to optimize my site speed, and it is glariningly obvious that Hubspot is the largest speed suck on my site. And NO, it's not semantics - multiple lookups cause my waterfall to lag like molasses.

At the same time, your competitors intimately know and understand this, on top of all the other things about Hubspot that have increasingly caused me grief.

Looks like I'll be booking for that Active Campaign call ASAP (Sly outbound email campaign they're running directly targetting your users, BTW).

Ignore threads like these long enough, and watch your competitors come in and sweep the rug out from under your feet faster than you can say boo.
 

Five years ago I was a Hubspot evangelist, screaming your name from the hilltops. Fast forward a month from today, and I imagine we'll have our firm and our client firms fully migrated away from Hubspot, and will cease recommending and assisting with implementation entirely.

I DO mean to be drastic. You DO need to listen. Choose NOT to act, and watch your market share erode in swaths.

Despite what little we do hear from the Hubspot voices on this thread - the developers in the crowd can read right through the BS - this SHOULD be simple to fix, it SHOULD be fast, and there's NO GOOD REASON why you should deny it from your paying customers any longer.

My two cents,
John

[Andrew-CI]

I agree!

We've recently spent a lot of time working on our site load speed and overall performance. The only way to get speeds to a remotely acceptable level (for users and search engines) was to load Hubspot asynchronously, and set forms to load right at the end of the process. Even that couldn't get our mobile speeds above 50(!) in Lighthouse. There's so much bloat in the Hubspot code - especially around leadflows.js.

Google has applied a mobile-first crawling policy for years, and recent updates have focused on user experience and site performance, we're finding Hubspot's failure to resolve this problem is causing real issues for our SEO.

It seems the only fix is to rip Hubspot out of our site. Which I really really don't want to do... but, like you, I've heard plenty from other automation providers recently. 

[PamCotton]

Hello, @Andrew-CI thank you for your feedback,  I would like to apologize for the frustrations, data issues, and business impact this has caused.  Have you connected with our technical support about this matter? I would recommend connecting with HubSpot Technical Support, as Support is included in your subscription and they will be able to provide real-time assistance for this matter, including hopping on a screen share if necessary. This way they can check your case specifically with more information you will be able to provide. 

Thank you,

Pam

[JSwystun]

Hi Pam! You may want to take a look at the rest of the thread.

This isn't a support issue. The Hubspot Wordpress plugin has been slowing down our websites for years, and Hubspot has done nothing to address the issue. This is a product issue.

Unless you're team actually confronts this issue - it seems like a tidal wave of departing Wordpress users may be upon you.

J


I finally pulled the plugin out of my site for the first time in three years - lo and behold my GTMetrix scores jumped from 45% to 100%!

What Andrew is describing is that he took extra efforts to attempt to optimize loading, which shouldn't be necessary in the first place. He deployed a workaround, 

[dianna]

Any updates??

[PBennett9]

We just tried to launch a new Wordpress site using the Hubspot plugin and ran into this issue, which is a game stopper for us. Since Hubspot hasn't fixed the issue what alternatives are folks switching to that doesn't slow down the site so horribly?

[DPetrohilos]

Has this been fixed yet? A client refused to use any other CMS, but also want to make sure my code is sound and seems sad if this was never really taken care of. 

[RagingBull]

I ended up working with an IT guy who ultimately helped me configure WP rocket and stack path CDN to resolve the issues.

He provided a lot of feedback to HubSpot but I don’t know where that ever landed.




Sammy (THE BULL) Koza | Digital Marketer
Info@ragingbulldigital.com | 651.343.2080

RAGING BULL DIGITAL
Website | SEO | Marketing
www.ragingbull.digital

[ReneeB]

I am trying to work around as much of the HS plug in as possible so that I can delete it and keep HS - I can move the analytics into Google Tag Manager; I can ditch using pop-ups and use the HS form embed code in my own popup modal in my Wordpress theme, but I still have Chat to contend with.  I am a paying customer and want to use chat on my site - but this plug in slowed our page speed on a new site we are creating.  My workaround for loading chat by delaying until 7 seconds doesn't seem to be helping because the plug in loads everything up front.  So we are thinking of creating a fake chat trigger that will force chat to load only when someone enacts the trigger.  @PamCotton if this will work and allow me to ditch the plug in and still use HubSpot for all of these features please confirm and point me to some documentation of best practices.  I need to decide on my contract for 2021 quickly and I am having a hard time justifying a contract of $25k for software that slows down our site.

[PamCotton]

Hello, We recently updated the "Time on page in seconds" trigger. Delaying the chat widget load by at least 5 seconds should optimize for a faster initial page load for those using the chat.

Kindly,

Pam

[Andrew-CI]

Does this also approach also work for pop-up forms?

If I switch pop-up forms to appear after a set number of seconds, rather than a % page scroll, will it improve page load times?

[ReneeB]

Thank you. But if you read my question - that is still causing the plug in to load everything in the largest conentful paint.  My question above is not about delaying - after digging on my own I found that new suggestion in the help text behind the question mark on the chat option. I set it to 7 not 5 to try to solve.  After that didn't fix, I added a 25% page scroll as well.  I dug onto other workarounds that other people have done and found the proposal to create a Javascript trigger for someone to click on something to activate the chat load instead.  My question is if I do that, and use GTM for analytics and use the embed code only for all forms can I eliminate the plug in completely and still maintain full HS functionality on a WordPress site. Also, I understand why you gave your earlier answers that your are trying to solve for users not bots. But they are my users that I am solving for.  As my software provider I need you to solve for the problems I am encountering in using your product.   It's the bots that control our SEO.  If Google says our page doesn't meet their score, then they throttle our appearance in search results. While this might have been an annoyance in the past, it is now critical.  Solving for Google Chrome as judged by Google is the threshold that I expect my marketing software to be solving for.  

[PamCotton]

Hello @ReneeB ,

I talked with our team and they recommended connecting with HubSpot Technical Support, as Support is included in your subscription, you will be able to provide additional detail to our support team including the URL you are testing and past/present scores.

Kindly,

Pam

[seidenfaden]

Indeed this is a serious issue. Please keep us posted.

[danpilat]

We're having huge issues with this as well. 

[cruisegear]

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.

-Phillip

[wbrooseboom]

Hello Cruisegear, 

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. 

Cheers, 

Boudewijn

[philipcron]

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.

[JonasHopp]

I'm facing similar issues as this thread is stating.

What's the status on the HubSpot's side?

[PamCotton]

Hello @JonasHopp,

I connected with our team, and currently, there are no updates yet about this case.

My recommendation would be to continue leaving our feedback here so our product team is aware of our customer's needs.

Thank you,

Pam

[philipcron]

Hi @PamCotton,

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?

Thanks!