WordPress.org

1. svedish
   Member
   Posted 5 months ago #

   Hi guys,

   Hope you are doing well.

   I need some help with an issue that is becoming more and more important now that I'm starting to see some visitors from Google, and this is just the beginning so it's important to sort this out sooner rather than later: loading speed.

   I have been lying to myself for too long now and the other day I loaded this website of mine (http://www.ciaolondra.it) from a machine where it had never been loaded. It took, once again, 12-15 seconds to load the home page. I loaded another couple of friends' websites running WP and the loading times were a fraction of this (3-5 seconds). Needless to say that the second visit is much faster, but since 80%+ of my traffic is new visitors I need to pay close attention to the first visit speed.

   I'm now determined to find the bottleneck in my website, but I am not sure how to do it or what to test? I mean, for example I have run a test on http://www.webpagetest.org and it shows how slow the website is, but I'm not sure how to interpret the data and what to test / change on my website.

   Also, my friends' websites running WP don't have any specific plugin to improve speed or other tricks. They are plain installations with a custom theme. My theme is also custom, but just a variation of twentyeleven since I liked the menu structure and the overall layout. It's perhaps worth mentioning that the home page is a page instead of the blog and that I have included few directives in my config.php file (as read on few blogs) to reduce the size of my db. These are:

   define ('WP_POST_REVISIONS', 0);
   define( 'AUTOSAVE_INTERVAL', 30000 );

   Can anyone please help me to solve this problem? Thanks a lot in advance.

2. Jonathan Dingman
   Member
   Posted 5 months ago #

   Check out a Firebug extension called YSlow, it will help analyze where the bottlenecks are.

3. svedish
   Member
   Posted 5 months ago #

   Thanks for your answer. I have checked that out, but it's not the kind of thing I'm looking for, at least I think. This tool looks like something that advices me on best practices. I need a tool that can actually test the loading times of my specific website, or Home Page and tell me where it's wasting a lot of time. There is nothing wrong in my pages in terms of best practices. Yes, ok, I could put all js in one file, compress things or use a Content Delivery Network etc, but these other websites I've loaded in the same browser (the ones that belong to friends) don't do all these things and they load in less than half of the time. I'm suspecting that my website has got a problem somewhere.

   Any other suggestions?

   Thanks!

4. Bjørn Johansen
   Member
   Posted 5 months ago #

   I took a look at your site, and it's the generation of the HTML that takes several seconds.

   Either you have something that takes a long time to compute, or you have a very slow host.

   You might want to take a look a caching plugin like W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache

5. svedish
   Member
   Posted 5 months ago #

   Hi,

   Thanks, that is already a good pointer. The caching options are interesting, but as I said in my first post, my main problem are the first views because most of the traffic I get is "first time" visitors. Any caching module, I guess, would not solve anything for first time visitors. Or am I getting this wrong?

   Many thanks.

6. Bjørn Johansen
   Member
   Posted 5 months ago #

   Yup, you're getting it wrong :-)

   You are mixing up client-side caching with server-side caching. The plugins I mentioned does server-side caching.

   Basically they store the generated HTML output, so the server doesn't have to regenerate it for all visitors.

7. svedish
   Member
   Posted 5 months ago #

   Hehe! Ok, fair enough. I have to confess that a part of me knew I was talking nonsense, but I was not sure. :-)

   Ok, that sounds like an interesting route, but there are a couple of questions that spring to mind straight away.

   First of all, doesn't WP already have an internal caching system?
   Also, not that this website is a news website, but being a touristic guide contents may get updated every now and then. What are the risks of serving outdated contents? Can you kind of set up things like expiration of the cached items or something like that?

   Thanks.

8. svedish
   Member
   Posted 5 months ago #

   By the way, I am trying out w3 Total Cache and I'm getting an error when I try to deploy... Have started another topic about it, so maybe the solution will be accessible to anyone.

   http://wordpress.org/support/topic/w3-total-cache-error-are-you-sure-you-want-to-do-this?replies=1

   Cheers!

9. Jonathan Dingman
   Member
   Posted 5 months ago #

   I would try Super Cache first then, it might be a little easier for you to get going with.

10. svedish
    Member
    Posted 5 months ago #

    Yes, of course, but does anyone know why W3 Total Cache is giving that error?

    By the way W3 Total Cache doesn't seem hard to use. I guess that must be a bug or conflict of some sort. I guess bug since this is a plain installation of WP without contents and other plugins? Unless it's a problem with the server setup, which again they should document?

    Thanks.

11. svedish
    Member
    Posted 5 months ago #

    Hi guys,

    I have a quick update about this issue with W3 Total Cache. I have downloaded W3TC and WordPress 3.2.1 on my local machine and installed under MAMP. I have the same problem, try to deploy and it brings me to that page asking if I'm sure I want to do it...

    What is going on? Is it a known bug? :(

12. Sabinou
    Member
    Posted 5 months ago #

    Why don't you try with Wp-Supercache instead of W3-Total-Cache, then ?
    Look, here, you're losing your own time when you don't even know if that will solve your problem ?!?

    Another option would be to install another wordpress blog in a subfolder of your domain. Create a subfolder by FTP, upload the default wordpress installation files as provided by wordpress.org, create a database within your hosting account's panel, make the new blog use that database, install the blog, let the blog use the default theme.
    From there on, if the new blog is as slow as the "official" blog, then you can blame your host and proceed to moving to another web host.

13. svedish
    Member
    Posted 5 months ago #

    Yeah, you're right. It may not even be a caching problem.

    Just to make sure I get what you suggest, you mean installing a brand new WP on my server and import the contents of my website into it to test if the problem lies in the current installation? If also this brand new installation is slow probably the problem is the host itself?

    Is this what you mean?

    Thanks!

14. svedish
    Member
    Posted 5 months ago #

    Another quick update (I hope it will at least serve the purpose of helping anyone else out there trying to achieve my same results :).

    I have noticed that W3 Total Cache actually works. The bug seems related more to feedback than anything else. The changes applied to the settings seem to take effect, and instead of clicking on the deploy button close to the Enable / Disable one, one can click on the Deploy button in the top area. Or you can just disable Preview mode and go for it straight away.

    Anyway, now I've done like 10 tests in a row with http://www.webpagetest.org and the results are consistent: around 2 seconds for the first visit and 1 second for the second visit, which is not bad at all considering that the previous results, with the plugin turned off, where anything between 4 and 8 seconds for the first visit and 2-4 seconds for the second one.

    I'm doing these tests on another domain with a dummy installation of WordPress to be honest. I have not installed any plugin on my main website yet (the one that was showing problems in the first place). I will proceed to test my "main" website soon. I hope this will solve the loading problems. It may well be a combination of factors of course: the web server may be slow as well, so I guess I'll try to install it also on a much faster server which a friend will give me access too next week.

    Will post my findings for anyone interested.

    Cheers!

15. Sabinou
    Member
    Posted 5 months ago #

    Just a last note, while I'm here. I must also precise that I'm usually obsessed with that damn frigging enemy of mine : TIME ! I never have enough.

    And in this regard, you're wasting a LOT of time testing, waiting for replies and all.

    If you belong to the "time is money" school (I regret to say I do), you OUGHT to simply purchase another hosting and test out there your other domain (or else, heck, buy a new domain)

    Purchasing another hosting account for one month, for instance a Baby Croc with Hostgator, would cost only 10$, on a monthly basis that you can cancell any time.

    From there on, if you don't want to install wordpress yourself, they even have auto-installers.
    Try. Compare.

    And for just ten dollars, the result of one or two hours of work, let's add 30 minutes since you wouldn't be familiar with the web host, you would know with 100% certainty (100% !) if your current web host is to blame or not.

    In a time / cost / efficiency point of view, I don't think it would be a bad idea.
    Just saying :)

16. svedish
    Member
    Posted 5 months ago #

    Hi,

    Thanks for your advice. I guess these tests may serve other websites as well, so it's possibly not all wasted time, at least I hope. :)

    Anyway I very much agree with you, also the hosting facility needs to be questioned. I have installed W3TC on my main website and will observe changes over the next days / weeks. Also in terms of bounces / pages per visit etc.

    In the meanwhile I have activated a Media Temple account and also an account with a European company that is apparently good. So I will also test the hosting environment. I guess I'll have some conclusions after this.

    Cheers. ;)

17. svedish
    Member
    Posted 5 months ago #

    Hi all,

    As I said last week, after doing few tests, I'm posting my findings here. I hope someone else having similar problems will find them useful.

    I activated another couple of hosting services: a Media Temple grid service and a VPS located here in Europe, in Italy in particular (since a friend of mine recommended this company's servers as very fast). I then uploaded copies of the website on both locations.

    The website's performance did not change much. The loading speeds were comparable to the ones experienced on the VPS where the original website is currently hosted.

    Using a caching system (using W3 Total Cache at present), instead, did make a big difference and reduced a 'first visit' loading time from (even) over 10 seconds to an average of 3-4. I've run several tests both with the Pingdom Tools and WebPageTest.org.

    Lastly, in terms of practical things (I was of course concerned about user experience), the bounce rates, time on site and viewed pages per visit have not changed much since I activated the plugin (12th Dec). It's just 9 days of data, but I guess that if the impact was big I would have noticed straight away. Probably that bunch of seconds did not make a huge difference for users and to lower the bounce rate (as well as increase the time on site and page views / per vist) I'll need to focus more on contents instead.

    Hope this will help someone out there.

    Take care and Happy Christmas to everyone! ;)

18. shirazdrum
    Member
    Posted 5 months ago #

    Get rid of your Google Plus One, That's your biggest issue.

19. svedish
    Member
    Posted 5 months ago #

    In fact, to be very honest, I hate it. :)

    I may really remove it. My only doubts is that it may help Google rankings? i don't really know... The service is kind of new.

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