You would be surprised at how much you can learn early on in WK. I play phone games in Japanese, and with the kanji I’ve learned to level 11 plus a few genre-specific kanji (like 敵, enemy), I can skim a new character’s abilities and get a good idea of what they do. So keep at it!
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Reviews first, then lessons only if you have time. Let me explain.
In SRS systems like Wanikani (and Anki, which you should look up if you’re not aware of it. I use it for vocab in Hirigana) your workload decays over time as you do reviews and the spacing between items increases. They’s just fewer and fewer young items in the pool. You can add more by doing lessons (in Anki you can adjust your new cards per day limit).
If WaniKani is giving you more reviews than you have time for, hold off on lessons while your workload decays a bit. If there are too few reviews, do more lessons. After a while you can achieve a nice steady state where the rate of items introduced is the rate of decay.
For example, I’m aiming for 40 ish items a day. Wanikani gave me 42 so I didn’t do any lessons. If it gave me 35 I might do 40-35 = 5 lessons. I never do more than 10 because 10 lessons a day for four days is better for the memory than 40 lessons all one one.
One other thing: by going reviews first, you consolidate what you have. A bird in hand is worth two in the bush, you know?
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I did all lessons as they came and burned out at lvl 19, returned to lvl 1
The way I do it now, is 10 lessons in the morning, 10 in the evening.
I make exception for radicals and kanji, when i first level I do all radicals, when I guru those I do all the new Kanji.
With these numbers I reach zero lessons at least once per level, even though I do all reviews as they come (especially the level up ones)
Find the pace that works for you, but most people recommend splitting up the lessons in smaller loads =)
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Haven’t burned out myself (hopefully won’t), but it became obvious at level 9 that doing every lesson as soon as it was available wasn’t gonna work forever.
I now do five lessons per hour from waking up 'til noon (about 30 total on most days) and hit reviews every hour, since they only take like a minute, which is easy to do while at work.
The way the SRS is set up, this means the last review for the day will be at 23:00, and I’ve got no more than five reviews at any time before 17:00, leaving all of the larger (10-20-per-hour) blocks for the evening, when I get home, which are small enough to work in between other activities.
Anything that I get wrong will fall out of the schedule and be in the first-thing-in-the-morning block, when I’ll be ready to re-learn it and maybe spread that stack out over a few hours, doing one or two items at a time alongside the new set of lessons.
I plan to further scale back to a max of 20 lessons per day at level 20, then probably 10 or 15 once I’ve got enough kanji to read most manga and start on LNs.
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Not only do I believe it is okay to take it slow on the lessons, I believe you may be better off taking it slow. 
To answer the title of your thread: absolutely yes.
If you plan to go slow, you can still get through levels in a reasonable time with 15-20 lessons a day. If that’s still too much, you might want to consider purchasing a lifetime subscription (if you think you’ll take more than 2 years to get through the material). However, no subscription is necessary until you finish all of level 3’s content.
There’s even a team: Taking It Slow
I’m on it!
You came here to learn, so the important thing is learning. What speed is best for you is the speed you should go. I’m on the Slow team, and am doing very few lessons right now. So it’s all good!
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I started feeling it at lvl 11, but stupidly pushed on. By lvl 19 I found it really does hurt your ability to learn every single one to push that hard, and the more I failed the more I fell behind. Ended up with 1600 reviews, which is possible to work through. But my recollection of items that had been left in guru for too long had gone down terribly. It is important for recollection to get that zero on reviews, not letting items collect dust in reviews and loose the precious srs window.
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I was considering going back at the end of 10, since I kinda missed the 7-day level cycle (versus the 9-10 I was now seeing), but level 11 convinced me it was a bad idea and I shouldn’t push it.
The time freed by not having multiple 50-review stacks waiting each night, coupled with finally being able to read (basic-but-super-fun) stuff at an enjoyable pace, more than offset the feelings of dread at seeing the time-to-60 estimate go up by half a year. It also helped that I realised that level 25 is around where games and most things I want to do start to become accessible, and each title I work through as part of the journey to fluency from this point on will take longer than a couple of WK levels.
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This is excellent advice. 
[I bolded some.]
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You can answer this question far better than any of us. On the logistics side, going slow can be bad if you are on a timed subscription or have a test like JLPT coming up soon. But for your personal reasons, that’s up to you to decide. Want to learn 2k kanji in a year and two months? Better buckle up. Don’t care if it takes up to 3 or 4 years to do it? Relax. It’s all up to your needs and desires.
You said you aren’t in a hurry, so lifetime may be better value, but it’s a double edged sword. Lifetime means you don’t have to rush and so are less likely to burn out, but without that sense of urgency, you may become extremely lax in your studies and never get past level 15 or 20. I see a lot of people say things like “ah, I’ve got lifetime, I’m just gonna take it slow” and they make little to no progress and/or quit. On the flip side, timed subscriptions help give you that motivation to keep working hard, but it might make you burn out. Personally, the yearly subscription has helped me more than it’s hurt. Sure, it’s been tough to do 7-7.5 day levels consistently, but doing so has helped me to stay on track and make significant progress in a relatively short period of time.
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Of course as other have said, it’s okay.
Is there a penalty? The obvious one is that it will take you more time to reach a useful level. The other one is that except if you take a lifetime subscription (which is way too expensive for me) you’ll end up paying more to reach a given level.
And that last thing let me think that the pricing scheme based on time (you pay by month or year) instead of by level (you pay to get a given number of levels indefinitely or at least for a very long time) may be counterproductive for people with not too much money to spend because it’s an incentive to try to go fast when it’s better for memory (and to avoid burning out at some time) not to rush things out.
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It seems that everything being “so interesting” is a feeling that doesn’t die out over time . Speaking to those who have finished, I still get the impression they are fascinated, which is a good thing.
Regarding your question, as @rodrigowaick said, accuracy>speed.
I am firmly rooted in camp “take it slow”, not because I think it is better for learning, but rather because it keeps things manageable for me and sets a routine I love, as follows:
Three levels in a row, power through, on the fourth one, do lessons as soon as you can. Then slow down like crazy. On the fourth level, I tend to take about five weeks, to push things up my SRS queue. And then I start back with powering through. I like it because I learn a lot in one shot, and then I get a break from lessons and drill the new items. Four levels seemed right for me because that amounts to a max queue size I can deal with, that number may be different for you .
When coupled with other learning techniques, it essentially means that I get five weeks of WK+writing, five weeks of something else (Satori Reader, general reading, grammar, listening, more writing).
At the end of the day, only you can gauge what works for you. We can only reassure and support. For what it’s worth, the support structure in this community is fantastic, it should help make your learning easier.
It’s definitely okay. It all depends on your goals. However, the below is also true:
If you have a goal to one day learn to read Japanese, you definitely want to keep up a bit of pace (this doesn’t mean a level a week, it could easily be double that without any trouble). The reason is that burning an item is just a WK term - it doesn’t actually mean it’s burned into your memory. If you don’t see an item again, many times you will end up forgetting it. The way around this, of course, is that hopefully about halfway through WK you can start really using what you’ve learned with real material. However, if you’re going too slow, by the time you reach the twenties and thirties and can start picking up things to read, you may well have forgotten items from earlier on in your studies.
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Don’t take it “slow”, or “fast” for that matter. Take each level at the speed that works for you. If you find yourself beginning to feel like you are not on top of it, then it’s a good time to ease off lessons and make sure reviews are going well, then as soon as you don’t feel overwhelmed, take lessons. You should always be a little bit pushed, but not totally out of your depth.
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At 20/30 reviews a day, it would probably take you 10-15 years to finish learning the kanji on this site, so I’d recommend you go faster.
The quicker you go, the faster you will be able to study actual japanese, and not boring textbook stuff.
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Yea, that’s painfully slow. I do 20 or 25 lessons per day and get about 160-175 reviews per day (I guess 320-350 if you count reading+meaning separately). So that’s only like 2-4 lessons per day or something? I’d suggest starting out at 10 per day (5 early in the day, 5 later in the day) and adjust from there. If you think you can tackle more, maybe try 12 per day or move down to 8 per day if it’s too much. I think 10 is quite manageable even on a very busy schedule. I work full time and have other obligations at home, and haven’t broken the 20-25 per day except when I only did 10 once (and made up for it with 2 days of 25).
As you said, though, at least some some new lessons every day is best. It’s really easy to break good habits, so try your best not to miss a day, even if it’s only 5 lessons.
Also, it takes time before you can get a good gauge on how your review schedule will work as you start getting items in each SRS tier, so give each volume of items/day a try before adjusting heavily.
Thanks for the link! And thanks for the great adivice in general 
I was hoping to start reading some shounen jump manga by level 10, since I heard they use furigana a lot and much simpler, dialogue oriented, grammar and vocabulari.
I’m going through this one book http://www.imabi.net/ along side wanikani, since some people said it was really good and indepth enough for a beginner. I’m really enjoying it so far! But I’ve heard well of Genki and TK too!
Yeah, I’m still trying to find the right balance. I find that some lessons are much harder than the others too, so whenever I feel lost I stop, review my notes, review wanikani a bit and then wait for the review to see if I got it
That’s a great insight!
I am planning on keeping with wanikani + duolingo + imabi and I think I’m slowly finding the right pace with all these helpful advice. I think feeling a bit pushed is good but I was kinda taken a back by the contrast in between level 1 and 2 ahahah
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Hahaha, I will! I’m trying to do at least a bit every day! Hopefully I’ll be able to read stuff later if I keep at it