[Resolved] slow website

[Author]

Posts

[nicolaT-2]

Hello,
we have built the website hidden link with your plugins and now we're struggling to make the pages load faster, as they're currently taking 5 - 6 seconds (or even more). The website is hosted by Flywheel, the WordPress version is 4.7.5 and the plugins are all updated. We tried to disable all the non-Toolset plugins but the pages are still taking about 4 seconds to load.

We created 19 views, 18 layouts and 7 custom post types, are they too much? Is there a suggested limit for them? We're now working on a far more complicated website and we'd like to know if we're going to meet the same problems.

We looked at the slow error logs and found that:
/wp-content/plugins/layouts: appears 58 times
/wp-content/plugins/wp-views: appears 16 times
/wp-content/plugins/types-access: appears 11 times
/wp-content/plugins/toolset-module-manager: appears 3 times

Could you please check if there's something wrong with our website?

We installed, among the others, Toolset CRED and Toolset module Manager but we're not using them. Can we delete them or are they needed?

Thank you,
Nicola

[Shane Supporter Languages: English (English ) Timezone: America/Jamaica (GMT-05:00)]

Hi Nicola,

Thank you for contacting our support forum.

Yes you can remove the plugins that are not being used. Also does this site have a large amount of data on it ?

Slowdowns can be caused by a number of reasons and not just due to our plugins.

Looking forward to hearing from you soon.

Thanks,
Shane

[nicolaT-2]

Hi Shane, thanks for your kind reply.
The website is not very rich of data, it has overall 120 posts and only 5 pages (I mean WordPress pages). I'm worried because we're now building another website that will have 3000 posts (and around 20 layouts plus 40 views). Will we have troubles with this new website due to its size?

Going back to hidden link, good to know that I can remove these plugins, I saw that Toolset Module Manager was automatically filled with my custom elements so i thought it was part of the core. After deleting these plugins the loading times are a little better but we're anyway over 4 seconds for a simple page with not much content. If I give you access to the backend could you take a look and tell me if something can be improved?

Thanks,
Nicola

[Shane Supporter Languages: English (English ) Timezone: America/Jamaica (GMT-05:00)]

Hi Nicola,

Yes please provide me with access to the backend so I can have a further look at this for you.

Thanks,
Shane

[Shane Supporter Languages: English (English ) Timezone: America/Jamaica (GMT-05:00)]

Private fields have been enabled.

[nicolaT-2]

Hi, the support from Flywheel have found three POST admin-ajax.php that are taking more than 5 seconds of loading time (here their screenshot hidden link), and it looks like they're emojis pulling resources from hidden link
Can you please check this? Is it possible to disable these icons or set them so that they perform better?

Thanks,
Nicola

[nicolaT-2]

Please let me know as soon as possible, we're having a seriuos trouble with this client because of these delays (that sometimes reach 20 seconds). This problem must be fixed today.

Thank you,
Nicola

[Shane Supporter Languages: English (English ) Timezone: America/Jamaica (GMT-05:00)]

Hi Nicola,

I'm currently having a look at the website now.

Is there a particular page that is loading slow that you can provide so I can have a look ?

Thanks,
Shane

[Shane Supporter Languages: English (English ) Timezone: America/Jamaica (GMT-05:00)]

Pages Load within 5 seconds on my end.

[nicolaT-2]

Hi Shane,
the peak moment has gone, we noticed that we have 15 - 20 seconds mainly between noon and 3 pm (CEST).

Anyway you can look now at the homepage, the heaviest page on this website, GT Metrix gives me 6 - 10 seconds for its load, which are anyway too much. I'm sending you a screenshot of a GT Metrix report obtained 4 hours ago when the page load was 17 seconds (in the details you can see that POST admin-ajax.php ranged between 4 and 7 seconds, it looks like the culprit).

The website has been optimized by a professional, the number of plugins has been dramatically reduced, Google fonts have been disabled, Flywheel checked on their side and told us that the server doesn't look to be hitting any resource limits in terms of CPU usage or memory limitations, but everything is functioning well within the server limits. We'd expect a website like this to load after no more than 3 seconds.

Thanks,
Nicola

[Shane Supporter Languages: English (English ) Timezone: America/Jamaica (GMT-05:00)]

Hi Nicola,

Would you mind installing the w3-total cache plugin and see if that helps to improve the speed?

Sometimes using caching methods on your site can help to improve the speed.

Thanks,
Shane

[nicolaT-2]

Hi Shane,
the website is hosted by Flywheel which handles caching at the server level, eliminating the need for caching plugins. Furthermore caching plugins run the risk of interfering with the Flywheel's caching.

Nicola

[Shane Supporter Languages: English (English ) Timezone: America/Jamaica (GMT-05:00)]

Hi Nicola,

At this time i'm not able to do any performance checks because the site loads in 4 seconds for me.

I would need to check this when there is a high load or high traffic on the site.

4-5s is within an acceptable range of load speed for a website.

What you can also try is to increase the memory of your website from 256mb to 512mb and see if that helps during the high load times.

Thanks,
Shane

[nicolaT-2]

Hi Shane,
consider that the 4-5 seconds you're getting are during nighttime in Italy, when the website is not stressed. The delays here are very frustrating between midday and 3pm (GMT + 1). Anyway I think that 4-5 seconds are too much for a website with a little more than a hundred posts.

We're working now - for the same client - on a new, much bigger and complex website that will have 3000 posts, our client is deeply worried that this new website will be much slower and is asking us to cut down the loading times for hidden link before going online with the new one. If we don't do it we risk to lose this job after a hard work.

If POST admin-ajax.php requests are responsible of this delay how can we fix the problem? Looks like these requests are linked to some emojis used by Types plugin (here under is the response, showed by GT Metrix, for the 3 admin-ajax.php requests):

<style type="text/css">
img.wp-smiley,
img.emoji {
	display: inline !important;
	border: none !important;
	box-shadow: none !important;
	height: 1em !important;
	width: 1em !important;
	margin: 0 .07em !important;
	vertical-align: -0.1em !important;
	background: none !important;
	padding: 0 !important;
}
</style>
<link rel='stylesheet' id='toolset-dashicons-css'  href='<em><u>hidden link</u></em>
/types/library/toolset/types/embedded/resources/css/dashicons.css?ver=2.2.9' type='text/css' media='all'
 />

It is vital for us to solve this issue, thanks!
Nicola

[Christian Cox]

Hi, Shane is off today so I will be taking over this ticket. I hope that's okay with you.

If POST admin-ajax.php requests are responsible of this delay how can we fix the problem?

Actually, the POST admin-ajax.php requests are not render-blocking. These AJAX requests do not block the requests below them in the waterfall, which you can see in the image you attached. I'm attaching a screenshot that explains why I believe these AJAX requests are not to blame.

I've run some tests as well and here's a link to the 3rd run on Web Page Test (a very useful resource!):
hidden link

The AJAX requests are not blocking "DOM Loaded" or "Document Complete" - which are the main events that you would want to optimize. You've got a somewhat slow time to first byte, but that's not because of AJAX requests. You've got a Document Load time less than 6 seconds, which is good, and it's around 4pm CEST right now.

Items 29 - 64 are Google Maps resources. They account for about 2.5 seconds of load time. If you could somehow delay the loading of Google Maps until the page scrolls to the map area, that would help cut down this time dramatically.

The main slowness bottlenecks I see are all the dependencies in the head of your document (items 3-23 in the waterfall I linked to), which are render-blocking. If you could combine those into compiled resources, you could cut down a large portion of your page load time. Since WordPress sites are compiled together from various resources, like themes and plugins, this is often not possible without significant custom coding.

There is also the time to first byte download, which is a bit slow. This is an area where a static, cached version of each page would perform faster, but only marginally better. The difference would be less than a second (since it takes less than a second to get the page as it is).