Zendesk is slowing our site dramatically.
I have looked at all the other things slowing the site and Zendesk is the vast majority of the problem.
I have researched and just found page after page of bla, bla, bla about the issue with Zero solutions.
Has anyone actually resolved the Zendesk slowing down your site issue?
An actual solution, not just more jibber jabber about how great Zendesk is without giving an actual solution?
I don’t think it’s possible to improve loading speeds of the Zendesk widget.
Here’s their official help page: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408838461978
It’s essentially reiterating what it sounds like you’ve already read. It’s a very intensive app – has a lot going on with it, which requires a fair amount of javascript to run (hence the time it takes to load).
Your best bet is to remove the widget from your site, and then link to it directly (in a new tab) somewhere on your site, so that your loading speeds aren’t impacted.
I think you are misunderstanding, I am not talking about using Zendesk with Shopify open, I am talking about the entire site for anyone/everyone who goes to the URL, the actual speed of the site for a visitor. Pages will not finish loading for over 17 seconds.
I cannot remove “widget” from site, we are on Shopify Plus and it is an App.
We do not have the chat enabled or other widget-ish aspects of Zendesk.
The Massive amount of Javascript is not optimized and/or the optimization is as useless as racing stripes on a prius, it looks faster but is probably slower.
Then it’s probably just a tracking pixel that’s been added by the app to your site’s theme. If you need the functionality that it provides, then you can try going into your theme’s index.liquid file and searching for the code. If you can find it, then you could try adding “async” or “defer” to the coding, so that it loads after the rest of the page loads (see here: https://web.dev/articles/optimizing-content-efficiency-loading-third-party-javascript?utm_source=lighthouse&utm_medium=lr#use_async_or_defer).
If you don’t need the functionality that it provides, then you should be able to remove the coding for it.
To be fair though (if this is the “michaelaram” site that you’re working with – I found a link to that site in one of your past posts on the forums), then your Zendesk’s javascript is roughly the same as your Google Tag Manager’s javascript (and GTM actually takes longer to load than Zendesk does). So it’s not actually too bad, comparatively.
If it’s any consolation, despite what Google PageSpeed Insights says, the site does load fast on my desktop and iPhone. I don’t visually notice any huge loading speed issues when browsing the site as a customer would.
Thanks. I will try adding “async” or “defer” to the coding.
Good to hear that for you the site loaded quickly, it is possible that I am over sensitive to speed issues. It is possible that our current version of our theme with our customizations are compounding the Zendesk issue and with the next theme update/change the issue will self-resolve, hopefully.
Upgrading (or changing) themes can definitely help sometimes – it just depends on the theme. Generally speaking, the newer the theme version, the faster things tend to load. However, the bulk of your loading speed issues (based on the PageSpeed Insights) are from tracking pixels (javascript) that’s added on top of the theme’s regular coding. So I wouldn’t be able to guarantee an increase in loading speeds by switching/updating themes – but it definitely shouldn’t make things worse … and at a bare minimum, you might gain some extra features/functionality! 
If you ever wanted to hire someone for a site redesign (or theme update), that is a service I offer – you can find a link to my site in my signature (bottom of this post).
I wish you the best of luck moving forward – hopefully those ‘defer’ & ‘async’ coding tags will help.
Would you mind sharing your website url via pm? I can take a look and give you a suggestion on how to improve your website speed and performance.