Sometimes having only one Gutenberg block plugin can’t be enough and you may need 2 to have the perfect design. This is the case for me, along that time I had tested a lot of Gutenberg plugins and currently decided to stick with 2 Kadence Blocks and GenerateBlocks.

Both have free and premium versions and are very different. GenerateBlocks comes with only a few blocks that can help you create beautiful designs, and Kadence Blocks with more than 10 blocks, can help you have tabs, testimonials or counters, etc.

The best would be to be able to use both for various tasks but I was wondering what would be the performance impact of having both. I like to have a speedy website (as much as possible in function of functionality)

In this article and in the video below we will see what are the extra request and how plugins comport when using both.

Video with Tests

Requests For GenerateBlocks

If you install only GenerateBlocks you will not have any extra resources loaded in the Posts you don’t use it. This is the case also for Kadence Blocks.

With GenerateBlocks, I have added a grid and a header on a post and even then we don’t have any extra requests done, the resources loaded are very fast. I haven’t tested all the things but these will be the things you use the most. So it looks like GenerateBlocks is not loading anything extra and just uses what is already there in terms of CSS and what WordPress loads. Video has all the details.

Requests for Kadence Blocks

There are 2 key things here:

1. The plugin is installed and no blocks are used – most of the time you will not needs to use any Kadence blocks on your posts for this case, Kadence is not loading anything, and you will not notice that it is even installed as is the case for GenerateBlocks.
2. The Plugin is installed and Blocks are used – things change for Kadence when you start to add blocks, If you add a row as with GenerateBlocks you will have 2 extra requests that are done. If you add the tab block that also needs JS you will have other requests that are added so you will have another 4 requests. In the function of the different blocks needed you will have an extra request. If you add the same block multiple times requests will remain the same as will need the same resources. Below are some resources that are highlighted:

Conclusions

Both plugins can be used without issues as if not loading your website with nothing if you don’t use them. GeneratBlocks is not even adding any new requests even if still used so it can be used without issues. The only thing that you need to take into consideration is the number of different blocks (counter, tab, Lottie animation, etc) that you need to have on a page with Kadence as it may impact the performance.

In this article the only thing I wanted to measure is the request number, you can go deeper if you want to measure the DOM size, etc, but now the important thing for me is to see if they can be used together without a major performance hit, and it looks like you can.