Replace Contact Form 7 to speed up your wordpress site

Contact Form 7 seems to have a great following. It helps your site to process web forms, and turn them into emails.

The code seems fairly old, and does lots of bad things, including :

• loading its js and css files on every page, even those that don’t have forms
• it does some ajax after the page loads, which loads some more code, that often takes 1 second. It’s difficult to see this, as it occurs after the page has loaded (but the spinny thinhy is still spinning). Worse still, its pegging 1 of your CPUs on your server for 1 second.
• CF7 runs that terrible ajax on every page, even those without forms
• It seems to double and triple up on these ajax requests when you have caching (who doesn’t have caching on their website).
• CF7 is often responsible for 50% or more of the CPU for a page, according to the ‘p3 profiler plugin’

So Contact Form 7 can slow down every page, and clag out the server’s CPU – great, thanx.

I’d suggest you replace your Contact Forms 7 with something more modern.

Here are some suggestions : gravity forms, ninja forms, fast secure contact form.

By Scott Farrell on December 24th, 2015 , Follow @scott_WordPress Tweet to @scott_WordPress