Managed WordPress Host Reccomends Against Using NextScripts:SNAP

Hi,

We have been using NextScripts:SNAP for a while now and upgraded to the Pro version.

Whilst we’re far from technically minded, NextScripts:SNAP has done everything we wanted to do, as we’re a busy news site publishing between 30-50 articles each day. We wanted something to automatically post articles to our primary social networks of Twitter, Facebook and Google+, which this does very well and thus far, we haven’t noted any problems.

However, we recently shifted our site hosting to managed WordPress hosting at Synthesis/Copyblogger and after an audit of our plugins to tidy up our site, to improve overall performance, they strongly recommended against using NextScripts:SNAP

The following is my conversations with Synthesis/Copyblogger support, based on their initial recommendation regarding this plugin:

SYNTHESIS: [REMOVE] NextScripts:SNAP.
This plugin is known for using a lot of server resources. Please consider replacing or removing.

ME: At the moment this is pretty integral, as it automatically posts our articles to Twitter, Facebook and Google+ in the format we want, which is to display the article headlines with an image and URL link.

If you can recommend a suitable alternative that’s less of a memory/resources hog, I’m all ears, though it needs to be something that can do effectively the same thing, posting automatically to Twitter/Facebook/Google+, as we get a lot of referral traffic from our social networks based on the format we post to them.

SYNTHESIS: I’m afraid we have no plugin to recommend as an alternative to NextScripts, as we feel like this isn’t a task that should be done automatically, so we always do it manually. However this plugin is known for causing serious performance issues at the server level and is the root cause of 404 errors on websites in 99% of the cases so far, so we strongly recommend against it.

ME: The issue at hand for us is that as we’re a very busy news site, publishing anywhere between 30 to 50 articles each day, we need them to go live via our social networks (principally Twitter, Facebook and Google+) as soon as they go live on our site. Although doing this manually is possible, it would create a massive burden to our workload and be very impractical, given we’re posting content 24 hours a day, every day of the year. We’re we just a blog posting one or two articles a day, obviously it wouldn’t be a problem to post manually.

Do you have any specific information you can suggest as to why it’s such a problematic plugin? Whilst I doubt I will be able to understand the technical details, perhaps I can pass them on to the plugin authors (www.nextscripts.com), in the hope your feedback will aid them in making it less of a resource hog, or to address any particular performance issues it creates. They may even be able to suggest ways we can fine tune settings, to help it run more smoothly.

SYNTHESIS: I understand importance of this plugin to your site. But this causes lots of overloads on your PHP.

We can try upgrade your account to Enterprise and see if with higher memory your site handles it better, but I can’t guarantee this to you.

You could talk to plugin developer and see if there is some fix to Nginx server to make it faster or decrease its overloading or set a cron to only share contents when server has few access. If developer wants, he/she can contact us in order to us help him/her to find solutions to improve codes, etc.

Obviously we want to keep using NextScripts:SNAP, for all the reasons you’ll have observed in this post. The dilemma is obviously that we also want to ensure our site runs optimally and within the Synthesis hosting platform, though unfortunately they don’t particularly like this plugin.

We’re in a bit of a Catch22 situation, because obviously we need to keep using NextScripts:SNAP, so if there’s a way we can co-ordinate myself, yourselves and Synthesis to resolve the issues they’ve raised, that would be greatly appreciated.

Ideally would prefer to discuss this further by email, however your website doesn’t appear to be working right now and I have no alternative means of contacting you.

Kind regards,

Heath

https://wordpress.org/plugins/social-networks-auto-poster-facebook-twitter-g/