Patreon Plugin Causing Site Slowness

The short version:
The free Patreon Wordpress plugin is causing my main blog to slow down to the point it’s timing out the connection to Zapier (I use it to automatically post new posts to my Discord server). I’ve been trying to figure out how to resolve this, but I can’t seem to come up with anything.

The long version:
I recently installed the free Patreon Wordpress plugin on my main blog, along with Patreon Pro, to provide early-access to select content in the near future.

I had made a blog post and noticed it did not automatically post to my Discord server via Zapier like it normally does. I went to check my Zapier and noticed the zap (the connection between my blog and Discord) was turned off. I tried to turn it on numerous times, but it kept shutting off. Eventually, I noticed I was getting a whole bunch of e-mails about not being able to turn back on the zap. After looking through Zapier’s help documents, I decided that it was better to e-mail them to ask what kept happening, since the e-mails I was receiving me was not telling me what was happening. Zapier responded back that the connection had timed out. I tried to reconnect my blog as they instructed, but it didn’t do anything, so I made the decision to figure out what the culprit might be.

I thought back over any changes I had made to my main blog and realized the last changes made were the installation of the Patreon plugins. I experimented shutting the free Patreon plugin on & off, as well as Patreon Pro. Eventually, I narrowed it down to the free Patreon plugin itself after I had kept on Patreon Pro, but had the free Patreon plugin itself deactivated.

I did do a bit of a further experiment today after corresponding a bit more with Zapier. It seems I can either use Jetpack or I can use the Patreon plugin on my site, but not both, on my main blog when creating/using a zap (the connection that will post a new blog post link to my Discord server). :upside_down_face: I have another blog on the same exact website (it’s used for the main draw of my Patreon content that’s intended to stay behind a paywall) that has both running and it functions perfectly fine and connects to Zapier as expected.

I’ve taken numerous action steps to have my site run faster (optimization, clear caching, lazy loading, etc.), but the moment I reactivate the free Patreon plugin, it slows down almost to a crawl. It’s not like the site runs slow with just Jetpack enabled or with Jetpack disabled. It’s only slow with the Patreon plugin enabled – I think disabling Jetpack only speeds it up just enough to create the connection needed on Zapier. (It’s also only, as I said, affecting my main blog, not my secondary one.)

As you can imagine, this is super, super annoying because I don’t want to disable either one – I want Jetpack for security & its overall features and I want the free Patreon plugin to create early access content on my main blog!

I’m looking for insight as to what could be causing the slowdown and what I can do about it. If nothing can be done, well then…maybe my experience can help a better plugin to be developed.

Thank you so much for taking the time to read this and thank you so much for taking the time to reply, if you feel inclined!

1 Like

So you have identified that when you enable both Patreon WordPress (free) and Jetpack, it causes slowdowns? Is that correct?

Is there any specific page that this slowdowns occur? Any particular error or warning anywhere?