I’m working on speeding up my site and the main drags on speed are of course third party scripts like GA, FB analytics and in particular newsletter sign up forms.
So i was thinking I might be better off creating and hosting my own forms with Formit, and then using the third party services just for sending.
Anyone got any thoughts?
Love to hear how anyone else is dealing with this.
Thanks
I believe there’s some documentation floating around for both mailchimp and campaign monitor api integration. You could create your forms in formit with a hook that registers the data from the form to the api to register them that way.
There’s also an extra ( I think its called eletters off hand ) which you can use to send emails instead of third party servies. It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of these third party services but by mixing it with modx you could create your own marketing automation. For example if you have a blog and news you could use pdoResources to automatically pull in the latest x amount of posts into your email template and then use a cron job to automatically push this out once a month or whatever… of course nobody likes email spam so make sure its decent content if you go this route! 
For analytics you could switch to something like Piwik too, though I’ve not used it myself in years. I believe it also has capacity for linking up with your modx users so you can identify and track exactly what pages each user of your site is going to… if you have a user registration site.
Thanks Ik,
yeah i was thinking of some form of api integration, or even zapier or IFTTT, process.
Didn’t really want to send emails from my own server as that gets too complicated, tedious and potentially dangerous. Usually your hosts don’t like you sending out more than a few hundred emails at a time. Plus GDPR rules also make it problematic.
That’s why I’d still need to use the third party services for sending.
As for analytics, yeah I tried Piwik, now Mamoto, but it was just as slow even when I hosted it on my own server.
But defering analytics, fonts and JS is another topic.
You might find the MailgunX class (part of the Notify extra) useful It uses Mailgun’s Mailgun PHP class and Guzzle.
Mailgun is free for (I think) 12,000 messages/month and does a nice job of handling Spam filters and deliverability. Here is their GDPR information.
It’s relatively fast.
What evidence do you have that Google Analytics and Facebook Analytics are producing drag? Have you tried a tool like Pingdom to see what might be slowing you down on the front-end?
Jim,
As I said that’s another topic. Happy to discuss that if you want to create another thread on site speed. And also happy to detail the evidence.
This thread is about email form performance.
Thanks Bob,
Might be what i need.
I did look at Mailgun years ago, but i think the setup was beyond me at the time.
Now it’s cloud based might be good time to look at it again.
Also, is your site down? I keep getting blank screens whenever I go to your site?
Thanks
Yes my site is down temporarily. It should be back up tomorrow.
The Mailgun setup is a little daunting, but the instructions are pretty good. You only have to do it once and it once the DKIM and SPF authentication is set up, it makes a big difference in keeping your emails out of the spam folder, and in some cases (e.g., Gmail) it keeps them from not being delivered at all.
Thank you for posting something like this