We dropped our jQuery dependency

Last week we released version 4.6.0 of Mailchimp for WordPress. The headline change is one that most people won’t notice at all — and that’s exactly the point.

The plugin no longer depends on jQuery.

Why this matters

jQuery used to be a near-universal dependency for WordPress plugins. These days, fewer themes and plugins load it on the front end, which means visitors who land on pages with our sign-up forms were sometimes downloading jQuery just to run a few kilobytes of form logic.

Dropping that dependency also gave us a reason to rewrite how we load our own JavaScript. The result: forms.js went from 22 KB down to 9 KB — a reduction of more than 50%.

For a visitor on a slow connection or mobile device, that difference is real. Faster loading forms mean more people see them before they bounce, and more sign-ups.

Nothing changes for you

If your forms are working today, they will keep working after this update. We handle everything through the browser’s native APIs, which are more than capable of everything jQuery was doing for us.

The only thing you might notice is that your forms load a little faster.

What else changed in 4.6.0

We also improved how the plugin fetches and caches your Mailchimp account details — data is now only retrieved when it is actually needed, rather than on every admin page load. This should make the plugin’s admin screens noticeably snappier for accounts with many audiences.

As a heads-up: installing this update also requires you to update any add-ons like Mailchimp Top Bar and Mailchimp for WordPress Premium if you have them installed. Earlier versions of those add-ons won’t work correctly with 4.6.0.

You can update via your WordPress admin area or download the latest version directly from WordPress.org.