I’ve written about scammy WordPress plugins in the past (see Simple Share Buttons Adder is an adtech and redirect nightmare). I noticed that this WordPress site was starting to feel kind of gummy, with a noticeably slower page speed, despite stripping out WooCommerce and other junk earlier this year and switching to a lightweight theme. Was it one of my plugins again?
Nope. It was Google.
I fired up Google PageSpeed to run an analysis. I got worried when I saw a lot of nasty warnings about 3rd party scripts and CSS files … until I realized they were created by Google itself:
The biggest offender: ReCaptcha, which is so integral to the operation of the Web it is nearly impossible to replace. But other Google services including Google Fonts are slowing things down, too.
In my Lean Media book, I talked about the temptation of many website operators to prioritize business needs over user experience, with predictable results: readers on a major business news website read as much as 8% fewer articles over a month-long period, for just a 3-second delay on the FT.com website.
Anyway. What to do about ReCaptcha? The solutions are not practical. So, like many other WordPress site operators, I will have to grit my teeth and bear it.