The Contact Form 7 plugin is commonly used WordPress form-builder plugin designed for the purpose of easily adding a contact form (or other forms) to your WordPress site.
According to the WordPress repository, it has been downloaded and installed more than 5,000,000 times and has a rating of four stars from those who use it.
While less feature-right than other form builder plugins like Formidable Forms and Formcraft, Contact Form 7 has developed a strong reputation for being effective at developing simple contact forms. Add-on plugins like Flaming and Contact Form 7 Extension For Mailchimp have extended the plugin functionality to make it more useful beyond just a simple contact form.
What we want to know, though, is whether enabling Contact Form 7 has any negative speed impacts on your WordPress site. Our goal with this test is to determine whether Contact Form 7 is a fast WordPress plugin or whether it could potentially cause negative speed impacts on your WordPress blog or website.
The question of “Is the Contact Form 7 plugin fast or slow” is exactly what our WordPress speed tests are designed to answer.
Our WordPress Plugin Testing Methodology
In order to determine whether the Contact Form 7 WordPress plugin could potentially slow down your WordPress site, we have designed a process to test the plugin for speed. Our goal is to provide fair and accurate testing that gives us baseline data to compare to.
We feel that first capturing baseline metrics allows us to effectively observe any negative speed impacts that occur when a plugin is installed and activated.
Our testing environment does not use any additional caching plugins or features, beyond what our host provides. We do not use any third-party Content Delivery Networks like Cloudflare and we don’t use any optimization features like script and CSS minification.
Essentially, our sandbox is just a basic WordPress implementation with a lightweight theme.
Establishing The Baseline Sandbox Environment And Content
Our methodology creates a basic WordPress installation using the Twenty Twenty theme for testing purposes. We call this environment our testing sandbox.
With the sandbox environment, we create a single post that uses 800 words of Lorem Ipsum text and three appropriately sized images for the Web. Each of the images is 1920 pixels wide and 1280 pixels high and are resized by the theme to responsively fit the screen. We feel that a post with 800 words, one featured image, and three images accurately represents an “average” blog post that can be found on most WordPress sites.
Again, no lazy loading, image compression, or optimization has been done other than the lazy loading features offered by WordPress.
With the sandbox environment and test post in place, we first baseline the environment for speed to determine how fast the test post loads without the Contact Form 7 WordPress plugin installed. This baseline gives us the metrics to compare to once we install and activate Contact Form 7.
To generate baseline metrics for the sandbox environment, we use multiple tests of three different speed testing tools.
- Google Page Speed Insights – We run the GPSI speed test five times and take the average scores of the five tests in order to determine the average desktop and mobile scores for the baseline testing post before the Contact Form 7 plugin is installed and configured.
- GTmetrix Speed Test – We run the GTmetrix speed test three times and take the average scores of the three tests in order to determine the average load time, page size, and number of requests for the baseline testing post before the Contact Form 7 plugin is installed and configured.
- Pingdom Speed Test – We run the Pingdom speed test three times and take the average scores of the three tests in order to determine the average load time, page size, and number of requests for the baseline testing post before the Contact Form 7 plugin is installed and configured.
With these baseline metrics captured, we have the necessary data to conduct the actual testing of the Contact Form 7 WordPress plugin.
The baseline data for the environment prior to installing and activating Contact Form 7 was as follows:
From the results, our sandbox environment was generating near-perfect scores via Google Page Speed Insights for desktop, at 97, and an average score of 89 on mobile.
Using GTmetrix and Pingdom to test the post, we are able to discern that the page loads at right at .96 seconds and the total page size came in at 345kb.
Essentially, the blog posts loads very quickly across all three tests.
Installing And Activating the Contact Form 7 Plugin And Testing Any Site Speed Impacts
Once the baseline data has been captured, we proceed on to installing and activating the Contact Form 7 plugin from the WordPress plugin repository. For testing purposes, we left all the configuration as basic as possible.
For Contact Form 7, that means we simply activated the plugin to see what impact it would have on the site.
Using the same test post we leveraged to gather the baseline data, we followed the exact same data-gathering processes outlined above and gathered the resulting data.
By comparing the post-installation data to the baseline data, we are able to determine whether Contact Form 7 has any negative speed impact on the testing post.
Results From The Contact Form 7 Plugin Testing
As seen in the testing results below, the Contact Form 7 plugin had nearly no negative impact on the desktop Google Page Speed Insights score. It did, however, drop the average mobile score from 89 to 82 which is about a 7% decrease in mobile GPSI score. The GTmetrix web speed test and the Pingdom web speed test results were nearly unchanged.
For the most part, these scores are a good indication that Contact Form 7 has a well-written codebase that operates as a lightweight, plugin and can be used without worrying about slowing down the desktop view of your WordPress site. If a large portion of your traffic comes from mobile visitors, however, you might consider whether a 7 point drop in mobile scores might negatively impact your site user experience.
Enabling Contact Form 7 will not speed up your WordPress site in any way and while it doesn’t appear to slow down the desktop view of sites, it might have a negative impact on mobile views of your site.
Observations Regarding The Contact Form 7 Plugin
Contact Form 7 has developed quite a following in the WordPress community and many WordPress admins rely on it to develop contact forms. With these testing results, it still provides that valuable functionality, but you might also want to explore options that might not slow down the mobile view of your site.
NOTE: Be aware that for our testing purposes, we didn’t add a contact form to a specific page. Instead, we tested what speed impact just installing and enabling the plugin would have on a site. Adding a complex form to your page may also result in decrease in performance since you are adding additional elements to the page.
With respect to the Google Page Speed Insights scores, the Contact Form 7 results were nearly identical to the baseline tests with respect to desktop. On mobile, the plugin did cause an additional drop in GPSI scores, indicating that Contact Form 7 will not negatively hurt your GPSI desktop scores but could hurt your mobile scores.
With respect to the GTmetrix and Pingdom tests, the results demonstrated that there were virtually no measurable negative impacts caused by installing and activating Contact Form 7 to add a contact form to your site.
As a result of our plugin testing, we give Contact Form 7 the rating of:
SAFE– This plugin causes no negative site speed impacts to a WordPress site. While it does not speed up your site in any way, it does not appear to slow down page load times or excessively increase the number of requests made by a WordPress site. As a result, installing and using this plugin will likely neither increase or decrease your site performance.
NOTE: While a plugin may not cause negative site speed impacts, there are always possibilities that a plugin could conflict with other plugins or themes. Please test all plugins carefully to ensure that they work properly with your host, WordPress theme, and all other plugins.
To view our testing results sheet, you can download it in PDF format here.
Additional information that might be useful in your evaluation or our test results are as follows:
Test Date: 11-20-2020
Plugin Version Tested: 5.3
WordPress Version Used: 5.6
WordPress Theme Used: Twenty Twenty
WordPress Theme Version: 1.5
Hosting Used: Siteground GoGeek
URL Of Test Post: https://sandbox.sitespeedsteps.com/site-speed-steps-testing-post/
Number Of Words In The Test Post: 800
Number Of Images In The Test Post: 3+Featured image
If you have questions about our testing methodology or results, please feel free to reach out via our contact form