Testing seven plugins that add content to WooCommerce product pages

27 October 2026

On October 27, 2026, I took one product on a blank WooCommerce 11.2 store and gave its page a size guide, a FAQ, color swatches, two extra fields, photo reviews and a video. I used seven free plugins from WordPress.org, one at a time, and measured what each one adds to the page.

All seven put their text in the HTML the server sends. What they load to get there goes from a single 3.2 KB script to 1,268 KB for one YouTube video.

One disclosure before the numbers: one of the seven, ProdTabs, is my plugin, and so is its paid add-on, ProdTabs Premium. I measured them with the same script as the others. The numbers for every plugin and both themes are in this JSON file.

• The test product
• What WooCommerce already shows
• The numbers
• Tabs with ProdTabs
• A FAQ with ProdTabs Premium
• Color and size swatches
• Two extra fields, two plugins
• Reviews with photos
• A YouTube video in the gallery
• What Yoast SEO and Rank Math count
• What I didn't test

The test product

The store runs WordPress 7.1.3 and WooCommerce 11.2.0 on my own machine, with PHP 8.3 and Apache compressing pages with gzip. I ran every test on two themes: Storefront 4.6.2, the classic theme made by the WooCommerce team, and Twenty Twenty-Five 1.5, the default block theme of WordPress.

The product is a linen overshirt:

• A variable product in three colors and three sizes, so nine variations.
• Four images, a short description, a three-paragraph description, a weight and dimensions.
• Three reviews, one of them with a photo for the two review plugins.

For each plugin, I activated it and set it up on that product the way a merchant would. Then I loaded the page five times in headless Chrome 155, 1440 pixels wide, with the cache off and the CPU slowed down four times. I counted the files, their compressed size, and the time Chrome spent running scripts (the median of the five loads).

Then I fetched the page once more without running any JavaScript, which is what a crawler that doesn't render pages sees, and searched it for the text the plugin was supposed to add. After that, the plugin was switched off and its settings removed before the next one.

My first full run had two problems.

WooCommerce picks the related products at random on every load, so the HTML of the same page varied by a few KB from one load to the next. I pinned them to the same four products for the test.

And the YouTube player loads in a frame from another origin, which Chrome runs in a separate process: my script saw that frame as a 0 KB document. I turned off site isolation in Chrome and ran everything again.

What WooCommerce already shows

With no plugin at all, the product page already has three tabs: Description, Additional information (the attributes, weight and dimensions) and Reviews. Twenty Twenty-Five shows the same three tabs through its Product Details block.

Here's the starting point on each theme:

The description and the three reviews are in the served HTML, hidden tabs included.

The script time of WooCommerce alone ranged from 192 to 225 ms across five loads on Storefront. So I read any difference under 20 ms as noise.

The numbers

Each row is what the plugin added to WooCommerce alone, on Storefront:

Twenty Twenty-Five gives the same files, give or take an image or a font. The video reaches 1,371 KB there, and Customer Reviews also loads its 17 KB review photo with the page.

Tabs with ProdTabs

ProdTabs adds tabs to the product page, inside the tabs of the theme. I gave the shirt a Size guide tab with a table of chest and length measurements, and two shared tabs, Shipping and Returns. A shared tab is written once and can show up on any number of products.

It added one file, a 3.2 KB script, and no stylesheet: the tabs use the styles of the theme. The compressed HTML grew by 1.0 KB, which is the text of the three new tabs.

All three are in the served HTML, closed tabs included, and each one has its own address: #tab-size-guide at the end of the product URL opens the size guide. On phones the tabs turn into an accordion, but I didn't measure the mobile layout here.

It's also very new: version 0.4.6 went up on WordPress.org on October 23, 2026, and it had fewer than 10 active installs when I wrote this. The 0.4.7 I tested only changes the admin screens.

The ProdTabs page has the rest, including translation with WPML and Polylang.

A FAQ with ProdTabs Premium

ProdTabs Premium adds a FAQ editor to the tabs of a product. I wrote three questions (does it shrink, is it see-through, which size to take). I also added a Details tab that reads Reference {sku}, {weight}, {dimensions}: the page shows "Reference LO-100" followed by the weight and dimensions of the product, in the units of the shop.

That cost one more file, a 0.6 KB stylesheet, and 0.6 KB of compressed HTML. The questions are details and summary elements, so they open without JavaScript, and the page carries a FAQPage block of structured data.

That markup won't bring back the FAQ dropdowns in Google, though. The Search Central changelog says the FAQ rich result stopped appearing in Google Search on May 7, 2026.

What's left is a clean list of questions and answers for any other engine or assistant that reads the page. I haven't measured whether any of them uses it.

Premium costs $49 a year for one shop.

Color and size swatches

Variation Swatches for WooCommerce (300,000+ active installs) replaces the Color and Size dropdowns with clickable swatches. I set Color to colored squares, with a hex value for Sand, Navy and Olive, and Size to buttons.

The swatches are in the served HTML as a list with role="radiogroup", with the original dropdown kept hidden next to it. Here's what I got for color:

<ul role="radiogroup" aria-label="Color"
    class="variable-items-wrapper color-variable-items-wrapper wvs-style-squared"
    data-attribute_name="attribute_pa_color" ...>

Nice for keyboards and screen readers.

The plugin's own script is 5.2 KB. Most of the 31.1 KB of JavaScript comes with it: seven WordPress scripts (wp-polyfill, api-fetch, api-request, url, i18n, hooks and private-apis) that WooCommerce alone doesn't load on this page. It's also the only plugin besides the video that added script time above the noise, about 35 ms.

Two extra fields, two plugins

I gave both plugins the same job: a Monogram text field limited to three letters and a Gift message text area.

Advanced Product Fields (50,000+ active installs) did it with two files, 3.3 KB in all.

Extra Product Options (30,000+ active installs) needed nine files and 104.8 KB for the same two fields:

• the Dashicons icon stylesheet, 35.2 KB;
• an input mask library, 32.6 KB;
• jQuery UI with its date picker, a time picker and their stylesheets, 32.3 KB;
• its own script and stylesheet, 4.8 KB.

There's no date or time field on this product. I'd expect the pickers to load only on pages that have one.

Both put the fields in the served HTML. I didn't test what happens to the values in the cart and the order.

Reviews with photos

Customer Reviews for WooCommerce (80,000+ active installs) has its rating summary, photo uploads and review votes switched off by default. I switched on those three, and added a photo to one review.

It added three files, 35 KB. The served HTML grew by 36 KB, or 5 KB once compressed: each review carries its two vote buttons as inline SVG, about 2.5 KB each. It compresses well, but it's still the largest HTML increase in this test.

Revopic Photo Reviews (10,000+ active installs) turns its photo reviews, rating summary and filters on by itself, so I only added the photo. It added eight files, 33.9 KB, including its icon font and, on Storefront, one more weight of the theme's Google font (13.9 KB).

Both keep the reviews in the served HTML.

A YouTube video in the gallery

Product Video Gallery for Woocommerce (10,000+ active installs) adds videos to the product gallery. I added one YouTube video, Big Buck Bunny, and kept the default settings, which put it after the four images.

It's the fifth slide, and the YouTube player still loads with the page:

• 19 files and 1,192 KB from YouTube and Google: the player, a Roboto font and a script from doubleclick.net;
• 9 files and 68 KB from the plugin: a lightbox, two zoom scripts, a slider;
• 4 images, 8 KB: one more gallery size and the avatars of the reviews.

That's 32 files and 1,268 KB on Storefront, plus 883 ms of script time with the slowed-down CPU. A thumbnail that loads the player only on a click, what Chrome's documentation calls a facade, would avoid nearly all of it. I didn't find that option in the free version.

The video address is in the served HTML, in the src of the iframe.

What Yoast SEO and Rank Math count

This one I measured earlier, on another test store, for a guide on the ProdTabs site. On a product page holding 642 words, most of them in tabs, Yoast SEO counted 58 words and Rank Math 66. Both numbers match the product description alone.

So if most of your product text sits in tabs, the word count of your SEO plugin is a count of the description, not of the page. ProdTabs Premium passes the visible tabs to their content analysis: with it, they counted 579 and 577 words.

What I didn't test

• Paid plugins, including the Product Add-Ons extension sold by WooCommerce, and the Pro versions of the plugins above.
• Page builders and their product widgets.
• Phones, real devices and real visitors: these are lab numbers from one machine, useful to compare plugins with each other, not as Core Web Vitals.
• Caching plugins and CDNs, which would change the transfer sizes but not the list of files.
• Carts and orders: I only looked at the product page.

If you haven't picked a theme yet, I scored 88 of them in another post.

None of these plugins hides its content from search engines. The difference is in what they load around it: one small script for tabs, more than a megabyte for one video.