Exactly the same problem here. Beautiful theme, but now considering changing theme because of the extremely slow load time. A real pity.
Try signing up for cloudflare.com for free, that should speed things up.
See also my answer at: https://wordpress.org/support/topic/super-slow-load?replies=5
I am also experiencing this issue. The problem isn’t with hosting, it appears to be two-fold.
1.) The site is essentially blanked out during preload, which is less than ideal.
2.) For some reason Oria is not making use of thumbnails. The theme loads full size images to display its grid, which means all of the full-sized images have to load before the site displays.
In combination, these two things lead to a site that, on arrival, can take a minute or more to load. This, of course, leads to high bounce rates, because anything more than a few seconds makes many users assume the site won’t load at all.
Pixelshrink’s previous suggestion, does not work – at least for me.
Other ideas? Is there a way to make Oria load thumbnails of the suggested images, rather than the full image itself?
I tried plugin profiler to diagnose plugin load times, deactivate as many plugins and functions as possible, w3 total cache, maxcdn, a lazy load plugin and various other tweaks and hacks. I even upgraded the server deal. While all of this slightly decreased the load time, it was still way above tolerable. The only proper solution was to change theme.
I’m fairly certain the issue is largely due to the theme not making use of thumbnails. Is there a way to fix it without changing theme — it really is very, very well done except for this loading bottleneck.
Is there a way we could contribute, or pay for this fix? I know it is work to get it done.
