Hi, Lana.

Firstly, I would like to sincerely apologize for the delayed response as we have been experiencing an unusually high number of tickets. I am sorry that it has taken longer than usual to respond to your concern and your patience is highly appreciated.

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1. First, just to comment on this error, as it said :

Allowed memory size of 134217728 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 98304 bytes)

If that came from wpDataTables, it means that our plugin just needed 98304 bytes,

and the rest of your website data has already taken up 134217728 bytes of your available PHP Memory from the hosting server.

When we convert 98304 bytes to MB,  that is 0.09375 Megabytes (MB), 

so our plugin tried to use less than 1 MB.

• These datatables ( connected/linked to Google Sheet source)

are not saved in the database like manual tables, but instead, their data is stored in database table 'wp_wpdatatables_rows'  in JSON format, not like manual tables (columns * rows).

2. Is there anyway to reduce the load WPDataTables imposes on my website?

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The loading speed depends on a lot of factors - your hosting plan, server's performance, amount of other data on the page, internet speed, etc. 

For example, you can take a look at this SQL table on our documentation, which contains around 2.600.000 rows, and see how it loads. The more data the table has, the more chance that it will impact the loading time, but it shouldn't be as drastic as it is on your end.

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When it comes to tables linked with Google Sheets,

it depends how many rows you plan to have on the Sheet data for each table.

If the table won't go over around 5, 6 thousand rows,

then you can try our Cache and Auto-Update cache Feature,

this helps with performance for non server-side tables.

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But if you get any table to go over 5 to 6 thousand rows, for such large data set , it is recommended to switch to the Import of the Google Sheet method,

and use our server-side processing to reduce the load on the server.

If you import the file, the plugin reads the source file and creates a manual table. 

Once the table is created, it is no longer linked to the source file, so changing data in the table will not show up in Excel or Google Spreadsheet, and vice-versa. 

To modify this table, you can either switch to the Excel-like view, 

and then select and copy the range of cells you want to paste from the source file, and paste it in the Excel-like view, 

or you can import a new/edited CSV to update the table, as well, in the following ways :

• Update manual tables: Replace data within an existing table.
• Update manual tables: Add data to an existing table.
•  Update manual tables: Replace the entire table with new data.

I hope this, helps, let me know if you have any additional questions.