NextGEN Gallery is a popular gallery plugin for Wordpress, but I noticed that it added quite a bit of overhead to my site, so I decided to investigate.
I used Firefox and Firebug to check overhead, and WP-Memory-Usage to check memory usage. The first thing I did was do a baseline test on a fresh Wordpress install. You can see my finding in the following table:
| Configuration | Requests | Data | Memory | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fresh wordpress install with just WP-Memory-Usage plugin activated | 6 | 27 kb | 10.65 mb | Baseline |
| NGG with default settings | 12 | 112 kb | 11.65 mb | |
| NGG with PicLens disabled | 11 | 105 kb | 11.65 mb | |
| NGG with PicLens and JS effects disabled | 7 | 32 kb | 11.65 mb | The only overhead in this configuration is the ngg.css file which is 5 kb in size. Memory usage is still 1 mb though. |
| NGG with Shutter JS effect | 11 | 105 kb | 11.65 mb | PicLens is disabled |
| NGG with Thickbox JS effect | 11 | 110 kb | 11.65 mb | PicLens is disabled |
| NGG with Highslide JS effect | 11 | 109 kb | 11.96 mb | PicLens is disabled. Used Highslide Integration plugin to add the Highslide effect. |
| NGG with Lightbox JS effect | 12 | 218 kb | 11.67 mb | PicLens is disabled. Used Lightbox 2 plugin by Rupert Morris to add the Lightbox effect. |
Note: I used Highslide Integration and Lightbox 2 plugins to add the Highslide and Lightbox effects with NGG.
Conclusion
As you can see, it’s not NextGEN Gallery itself that adds all the overhead, but the javascript image effects and the PicLens feature. It’s possible to disable all the eye-candy and get a slim NGG installation. But what is interesting is to see the huge amount of overhead added by using the popular Lightbox effect!
Thanks for the review. I stumbled across your post while researching exactly the same issue on my website. I currently use Thickbox because I prefer the feedback it gives when images are loading and I can live with slight increase in size over Shutter.
But have you found any other better third party js effects with even lower overheads than Shutter? I’m sure there must be something about…
Thanks