Ok, sorry for the agressive title, but the problem must be addressed for real. As it stands, wpDataTables is virtually unusable, unfit for the market. Don’t get me wrong, I would love to love the product, tables look nice, we can do plenty of things with them, but the load time is killing it.
Performances have always been a disaster, naively I hoped it would get better, but it’s just getting worse. As answered here (https://wpdatatables.nolt.io/13), the placeholder version increased even more loading time.
A simple and optimized SQL query table which returns and displays a single line takes about 5 seconds. A flat SELECT * on a 1,000 lines table takes about 20 seconds to display.
My website is a gran public site, with 10k visitors per day, relying heavily on high rankings on Google. I’ve lost 30% of my traffic over the last 6 months due to performance issues, and 80-90% of the load time of my pages come from nothing else than wpDataTables.
With the recent upgrades, I’ve come to the conclusion that the decision making process of the team is flawed, performance is virtually ignored, even when performance improvements are marked as completed. It’s the whole mindset that is wrong.
More concretely, I’ve 40+ plugins installed, yet when I look at the list of CSS and JS files to optimize the loading process, more than half (!) are from wpDataTables. No less than 41 (!!) distinct CSS and JS files. That includes a 322kb for the entire bootstrap CSS (mostly unused), 107k for the skin ‘aqua’, 115k for the skin ‘dark’, a JS fonts of 567kb (for real?!), and now, the absolute madness…. a 1.075Mb JS file for the new PDF feature. What if I don’t use it? Nor the aqua or dark skins? Fact is, I don’t, and I’m not planning to! Why each of my 10k daily visitors should load these crazy big files that ain’t used anywhere?!
None of my 40+ plugins, even Discuz nor jQuery, reach 120kb with their JS files. Most are below 10kb. In total, wpDataTables’ JS weight is an unbelievable 2456kb. And then, wpDataTables’ CSS consumes more than even my theme, it’s ridiculous. All that just to see some of these files popping up on performance reports because they aren’t minified. And to see undesired piece of codes loading no matter what (like the Edit functions in the source code of my pages when it’s not active for the table).
I get that this doesn’t matter so much for a table where a team would work, keeping the table open for hours while doing some edits. It’s a nightmare for a website relying on SEO yet.
You need to change the mindset which tells you that putting code that remains unused isn’t an issue. It is. I haven’t dig the files myself, but seeing the absence of efforts to reduce the size of the files, and their quantity (total file size suggests over 100,000 lines of codes!!) I can only expect that the refactoring of the code should be a mirage.
These tickets are called “Make a suggestion”. I’ll make one: STOP working on anything else than improving performances for at least 3 months. Focus 100% on it if you want your product to continue being seen as an acceptable solution for companies like mine.