Best Performing Dark Mode plugin I’ve tried, well-priced, but has some issues.

I came from WP Dark Mode after being unhappy with the performance hit on the “free” version and being in complete disbelief of the pricing they had for the pro version (which has the improved loading performance).

Darklup started off pretty well, loaded way faster, worked well in testing across my posts, had what I’d consider a reasonable price too.

There was a money-back guarantee, so I decided to purchase a lifetime license, this is the first time I have ever spent money on a WordPress plugin.

After buying, I made the effort to get it setup properly on my site, for all my pages, and I quickly noticed there was quite a lot of work required:

• I noticed that many of the default WordPress blocks were completely unreadable with Darklup enabled, causing accessibility issues. I had to set up exclusions for all of these along with custom CSS to get them to work in the Dark mode properly, this took me about 2 hours to get right.
• I also noticed that after installing Darklup I was getting console errors on my site, which were coming from Darklup, I reached out to support, and they corrected the issue after some back and forth and testing on my part. It seemed that debug code was left in, causing all browsers to attempt to connect to the dev environment on the plugin dev’s computer.
• The next problem I found was that wp-login had broken positioning for the Dark mode slider, this looked problematic but was thankfully only a minor issue, the developer was able to fix this one pretty quickly.
• Following the above I ran the plugin for another week, and found an issue with the “Exclude Element” setting, where it does not properly exclude an element from another one of my plugins, this causes problems with the functionality (not just visuals) of the other plugin. Even after configuring Darklup to be excluded on pages with this block, it still runs and causes the issue.
  I have also reached out to the developer on this one and am currently awaiting a response.

I imagine I will get that last issue fixed by the plugin dev soon, but either way I think this paints a pretty clear picture on what the experience will be like for people who install Darklup.

I want to be clear, I run an extremely simple, lightweight, WordPress site.
I use the default theme and a small handful of very basic plugins, I optimise for speed, and I do not use many different blocks/elements on my posts.
Even with my simple site I have run into 3 issues in my first week, so I would be very cautious when implementing Darklup on a large/complex WordPress site, as it is likely to cause/have some problems.

The general feeling with the plugin, documentation, and support is that it all seems to be very “green”.
Yes the plugin works, but the code quality isn’t the same as other plugins I have worked with, I am much more worried about vulnerabilities with the code in a plugin like Darklup.
I even read another review where the dev’s website was hacked, so I would be very careful if you are installing this on a WooCommerce site for example.

I’m leaving 3 stars for the plugin at this time, I have had a positive experience, and I have improved the performance of my site significantly, but I think there is room for improvement with the functionality.

Some of my feature requests:

• It would be good if all built-in WordPress blocks were supported by Darklup, and maybe some popular 3rd party plugin blocks too.
• Additionally, the exclude settings UI could be better, at first I didn’t realise that I could exclude multiple of these at once (Pages/Posts/Categories , HTML Elements , WooCommerce).
• The animations for the Dark mode slider and the transition from Light to Dark could be improved, I still prefer the sliders from WP Dark Mode.

My review is based on the plugin functionality, not the feature requests.

I will update if I encounter any more issues or improvements.

Thanks,