Debilitatingly broken plugin

I’m not usually the type to leave a review, but my experience with this plugin was absolutely debilitating to my website.

After installing this plugin, my site’s loadtime on images dropped from about 800ms to anywhere between 5s to 8s. This was devastating to my user experience, as I host a webcomic and page load time from comic to comic being as fast as possible is crucial to me for new and old users alike. Not realizing it was this plugin causing the load time, I spent days optimizing my images, asking my hosting provider to take a look at/move my databases, etc. What I’m left with is a site that’s now very fast now that this plugin is no longer on it.

This plugin installs an option to lock each post, page, or comic that you create on WordPress. You can specify a dollar amount, and if the dollar amount is more than 0, it will lock that content to become patron-only. However, it will also occasionally lock ALL of your content to “$0 patrons only”, and will just straight up fail to load your site at all. When it does load the site, it still runs a check on all of your content to make sure that it isn’t locked. This makes even unlocked content load very slowly, and that’s only when it doesn’t completely error.

I had some users ask me in confusion if I was planning to Patreon lock my entire site considering they were getting the “this is for $0 patrons only” error message, and that’s a pretty confusing message to read. I some had users in other countries tell me my site was so slow that it was nearly unresponsive. My hosting provider had no idea what to tell me, and pingdom.com reported no issues with the site itself in any way that I could optimize. It was a very frustrating week, and I lost tens of thousands of pageviews a day over the course of the week because of how frustrating using my site became for the hundreds of pages that are not and never were intended to be Patreon only.

I can only imagine that this plugin (as it exists right now, with these current issues) would only be functional for a website that WAS intended to be 100% locked to only Patreon users – but even this seems flawed, as I had 2 or 3 Patreon users still attempt to log in to Patreon-only content only to be cycled through the login screen multiple times. I had to clear the cache and flush permalinks 3 or 4 times before these users could even get in, and they then reported a day or two later that they had become unable to log in again. It was beginning to look as if I had to flush the permalinks and clear the cache every day to maintain viability, even if nothing on the backend had changed. And this was even after I set all Patreon-only posts to not be cached.

Of course, when I uninstalled it, it broke most of the images on my site as well. I found that if this happens, flushing your permalinks one more time seems to do the trick and restore broken images.