I was gutted to get my first one-star review on the WordPress repository. The reviewer commented that just activating the plugin reduced pagespeed by 60% and the plugin uses frames and tables with no styling.
The second part about frames is not true at all! Tables are used for some forms and for displaying tabular data.
But I was horrified to find that performance was degraded just by activating Church Admin.
Here’s the performance results (from tools.pingdom.com) of a fresh install of WordPress 5.8.2 with no plugins and the Twenty-One theme.
That was my benchmark!
Next I activated a fresh install of 3.4.105 of Church Admin and got this result…
That is a fairly large performance drop, especially as the page being tested only had the initial “Hello World” post on it. Although ironically the load time was faster! The page size and the number of requests for file are much larger, causing the performance grade hit
Five hours of tinkering and I have worked out that I have been adding all the scripts for blocks wrongly, including back end scripts on the front end. Oops!
Version 3.4.106 will be a zippy fast optimised that only loads scripts when they are needed.
Here’s the performance results.
You can see from the page size and requests, nothing that is not needed for that page is served, so the performance grade is vastly improved.
I’ll be updating the plugin to 3.4.106 once I have fully tested all 40 shortcodes and 27 blocks to make sure they all work with performance changes.
