I would love your help, please. I have two custom post types (CPTs) and I built archives for both. I decided to change the URLs, which wreaked all kinds of havoc on my CPTs, including making my post forms disappear and having to be rebuilt (all my custom HTML was gone). In fact, I have found that items on my post forms have a habit of disappearing/rearranging themselves at whim, but I digress.
My big issue is that my archive for one of those custom posts became very slow. While it does have a lot of search filters, there was no slowness before. It was loading in 1 second (like my other archive, which has fewer search filters), but now it takes 7 seconds.
I am at a loss for what to do because I don’t want to have to resort to trying to start over and remake a search form/ archive on a normal WordPress page, because then I lose the breadcrumbs, and each individual post type will lead users to the main archive page anyway. Even though archives seem trickier to protect (with Memberpress, which I use for payment), I think they are better overall.
Thank you for a truly great tool. I would love your help to make it work. My site is hidden link and the problematic archive is hidden link. This is the other archive I have that remains fast: hidden link (just in case you want to compare).
If this archive is a right off, how would I go about creating a duplicate one (since there is no "clone archive" button) and put a new one in its place?
Hello. Thank you for contacting the Toolset support.
I checked the URL you shared:
- hidden link
I can see that the page takes 5 seconds. When you build search archive or search view, the load time depends on the number of filters, the data structure (taxonomies, relationship) etc.. and server capacity.
In general, performance obviously affects the site speed when you have hundreds of custom post type setup with the number of taxonomies as well as custom fields and relationships. Another aspect is how much content you have BUT it depends also on your server configuration (CPU,memory,cashing) as well as number of other factors such as how complex your data structure is.
Hi Minesh, thank you for your super speedy response. I really appreciate it.
I understand that having more search filters may result in performance issues, but the thing is that this archive was absolutely fine and not slow at all until I made the URL change. It really wasn’t slow at all.
I have the Siteground speed optimizer and Memcached is toggled on right now. I have cleared my cache. I have checked for redirects that might be slowing it down. This archive was built two weeks ago and was working perfectly (and fast) and suddenly became slow last week.
As per the link you provided (How to Use Views Custom Search on Large Sites), I don’t see a caching option for my view (screenshot attached). And what about safeguarding this archive while potentially building a new one in case this one isn’t salvageable?
Would you like to get access to my site to have a look? I will happily provide details.
Minesh will be available tomorrow. Changing CPT slugs (and therefore the archive URLs) shouldn’t by itself make an archive 5–7× slower. When that happens right after a slug change it’s usually one (or a mix) of: rewrite rules needing a refresh or the archive got reassigned in a way that expands its scope.
I suggest that you check the steps below:
Flush permalinks
Go to Settings → Permalinks and click Save Changes once.
This regenerates rewrite rules after slug changes and eliminates slow “fallback” queries WordPress can do.
Confirm archive assignment
Go to Toolset → WordPress Archives. Open the archive used on /travel-journalists and check Content Selection. Make sure it’s assigned only to the Journalists CPT archive (and not accidentally to “All archives” or other lists).
Recreate the Archive
Try to recreate the Archive and see if it fixes the issue.
I would like to flag something very strange that has transpired today. Since my search page/archive became very slow after a URL change, as I reported, I decided to try to rebuild it on a regular page to see if that would impact the speed (and also since pages are easier to protect – I have not discovered a way to block people from seeing the contents of archive pages).
So, I rebuilt the entire search page (hours of work), made a duplicate of that page for safekeeping/security, and by the time I finished, the new archive/search page was indeed faster than the older one.
But then, I cloned that search/archive page (let’s call it CPT 1), made a new search/ archive page for a different custom post type (CPT 2), and it cannibalised the one I had made earlier for CPT 1 and replaced ALL the content, even though they are two pages that had nothing to do with each other.
And that safekeeping duplicate of the CPT 1 search page I had made as soon as I was done? That ALSO was replaced with the contents of CPT 2.
To break it down in case my message isn’t clear, I had two completely separate search pages have their content wiped out and replaced with the contents of a 3rd page I made.
And by the way, this will now be the 3rd time I am attempting to build this same search/archive page after it disappeared into thin air twice before.
Could you please advise?
Thanks so much in advance.
PS: For the super slow archive page, I had already flushed permalinks and confirmed archive assignment before attempting to recreate the archive today (in vain).
When you create new custom search page in replcement of your archive, you should make sure that when you duplicate the page, you should also duplicate the view you create. I'm not sure if you use block view or legacy view.
If you use block view, once you duplicate the page, on duplicate page, you should remove the existing view block and try to add the view block again and select your desired view from the view block that will give you option if you want to use original view or make a copy of it, You should make a copy of the view and then make the changes to it.
