The Zero Spam plugin is commonly used WordPress anti-spam plugin designed with the goal of reducing unwanted spam comments submitted in the comments section of any WordPress post.
According to the WordPress repository, it has been downloaded and installed more than 30,000 times and has a rating of four and a half stars from those who have installed and activated the plugin.
While not nearly as popular as the Akismet anti-spam plugin or the Antispam Bee plugin, WordPress Zero Spam has developed a loyal fan base. Reviews are mixed with some users expressing dissatisfaction with recent updates to the plugin.
Our interest, however, is whether installing and activating the plugin has any negative impacts on your WordPress site speed. Our goal with this test is to determine whether WordPress Zero Spam 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 WordPress Zero Spam 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 Zero Spam WordPress plugin could potentially slow down your 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 initial baseline metrics allows us to effectively observe any negative speed impacts that could 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. We don’t even lazy load images, beyond what WordPress does natively.
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 Zero Spam WordPress plugin installed. This baseline gives us the metrics to compare to once we install and activate Zero Spam.
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 Zero Spam 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 Zero Spam 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 Zero Spam plugin is installed and configured.
With these baseline metrics captured, we have the necessary data to conduct the actual testing of the Zero Spam WordPress plugin.
The baseline data for the environment prior to installing and activating WordPress Zero Spam was as follows:
From the results, our sandbox environment was generating an average score of 97 via Google Page Speed Insights for desktop and a average score of 83 on mobile.
Using GTmetrix and Pingdom to test the post, we are able to discern that the page loads at right at .8 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 Zero Spam Plugin And Testing Any Site Speed Impacts
Once the baseline data has been captured, we proceed on to installing and activating the Zero Spam plugin from the WordPress plugin repository. For testing purposes, we left all the configuration as basic as possible.
For Zero Spam, that means we simply activated the plugin and the checked to make sure the settings were already pre-configured and clicked “Save Settings” at the bottom of the Settings page.
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 Zero Spam has any negative speed impact on the testing post.
Results From The Zero Spam Plugin Testing
As seen in the testing results below, the Zero Spam plugin did have a speed impact on the Google Page Speed Insights Scores, the GTmetrix web speed test, and the Pingdom web speed test.
With respect to the GPSI test, the desktop scores remained the same, but the mobile scores dropped from the baseline of 83 to a score of 79. That’s a 5% decrease in performance on mobile just for installing a single plugin.
With respect to Pingdom, we saw a double in page load time as the test went from 809ms to 1726ms after installing and configuring WordPress Zero Spam. This means the load time nearly doubled.
Keep in mind that we run test test multiple times and average those scores in order to ensure that one single test isn’t reporting the positive or negative impacts.
Observations Regarding The WordPress Zero Spam Plugin
The WordPress Zero Spam plugin has developed a positive reputation in the WordPress community and many WordPress admins rely on it to reduce their spam comments. With respect to speed, however, it is possible that WordPress Zero Spam could be causing a minor speed impact to their sites.
Each WordPress site owner will need to determine whether the benefits of installing this anti-spam are worth the slight performance decrease they could experience after installation and activation.
As a result of our plugin testing, we give Zero Spam the rating of:
CAUTION – This plugin causes a minor speed impact to a WordPress site. While it does not speed up your site in any way, it does appear to slow down your page load times slightly. As a result, installing and using this plugin could result in a slight 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: 4.10.2
WordPress Version Used: 5.5.3
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