Gravity Forms
+ Form Speed Profiler & Optimizer

A Gravity Forms submission is a chain of steps that run while the visitor waits: validation, the entry save, every feed add-on, every notification and the code other plugins attach to the form. When one of them is slow, the whole submission is slow, and from the outside it all looks like the same spinner. The Gravity Forms Form Speed Profiler & Optimizer add-on shows you which step takes the time.

Switch the profiler on for one form or any form, for the next few submissions and a time limit; it switches itself off. Each profiled submission or page change gets a waterfall: start-up, validation, entry save, each feed add-on, each notification with its mail sending, payment steps and every callback hooked into Gravity Forms, with the plugin it belongs to and its database queries. The report averages the profiles, lists the slowest steps and the time per plugin, and gives plain-language suggestions such as a notification that waits for the mail server or a feed add-on that averages several seconds.

Four optional front-end switches per form make the form page lighter: load the captcha on the first interaction, render long choice lists such as a country list on focus, let the browser skip rendering a form below the fold, and defer the Gravity Forms scripts where WordPress allows it. A page-weight readout compares the form preview with the switches off and on. The profiler is admin-only, stores timings and names but never what visitors typed, makes no outside connection, and with the profiler off it registers no timing code at all. For Gravity Forms 2.9 and newer.

While a profiling rule runs, the add-on marks the start and end of each Gravity Forms step and, while a Gravity Forms hook runs, measures each callback attached to it, without changing what the callback receives or returns or the order in which callbacks run. Feeds are timed per feed add-on, notifications per notification (from building the e-mail to the moment the mail system accepted it), and every callback is attributed to its plugin, must-use plugin or theme. When the request ends, the timings become a profile in the add-on's own table, capped to the last 50 profiles and deleted after 14 days by default. A profiling slot is taken with a single atomic database update, so parallel submissions never exceed the number you chose. Unlike configuration checks, feed-failure monitors, Gravity Forms logging or page-speed tools, it measures the time of each submission step on the server. With no rule running, the add-on reads one setting and adds nothing else. Everything runs on your own server — no outside HTTP request beyond the licence and update checks.