Update Slowed Site Horrendously

OK. This is a bit lengthy. But, will try to make it as clear as possible.

I did a site for a non-profit (WV Patriot Guard) using an older theme slightly customized for display purposes. It uses NextGen for displaying mission photographs. The site was working fine (sometime in the fall, I think) with 2.0.33. I did updates and the site slowed to an unusable speed. So, at that time, I went back to 2.0.33 and the site was fixed…. or so I thought. Apparently, they have been unable to add galleries/photos since about that time. I thought things were working ok and I even added the NextGen Public Uploader at some point.

So, Friday night I updated everything on the site, including NextGen in the hopes that the speed issue was resolved and it would fix their issues. The site immediately slowed to a crawl. I disabled other plug-ins, did reset, cleared cache, everything I could think of or research.

I went back to 2.0.33 and the speed issue resolved. So, I started looking at what their gallery creation issues were. There were multiple errors related to uploads not completing, thumbnails not being written, ” imagecopyresampled() expects parameter 1 to be resource, boolean given” etc. I did discover that the php memory needed increased, which resolved some of the issues. But, clicking “Add Gallery\Images” resulted in the “You browser doesn’t have Flash, Silverlight, HTML5, or HTML4 support.” issue. Adding galleries via “Manage Galleries” worked, but adding pictures would not. Adding via post resulted in a blank darkened overlay screen. Editing the gallery to “add page” for linking the gallery would only show the first 20 pages in the list.

So, after finding a post about permissions causing issues for some people and fixing that; and increasing the PHP memory limit, I tried again to update to the newest NextGen. All the problems resolved EXCEPT for the speed issue.

The strange thing is, once you can get to a page that contains a gallery — if you can wait long enough — the gallery displays quickly from picture to picture.

So, now I have their photo issues resolved, but the site is nearly unusable for speed. Again…. I have disabled other plug-ins, did reset, cleared cache, everything I could think of or research.

The only thing I noticed is the size of the photos for the galleries is larger than I like, which I am in the process of correcting. I have the option to resize the uploaded photos set, but the photo file sizes are still larger than I like.

I got the P3 plugin and ran tests and ran speed tests from Pingdom, W3, Webpagetest, and they have not helped.

At this point, I can choose either a slow site or broken Nextgen.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/nextgen-gallery/