Anyway to make this theme load faster?
 

Hi,

I have a wordpress CMS site running on this theme that is loading kind of slowly.

When I look at the code of the pages generated, it seems there's a lot of code at the top before the actual content. Is all this code necessary? Doesn't it slow down the site?

Another question is how to make the center container load before the left sidebar. This will allow the readers to start reading while both sidebars load.

How can this be done?

Thanks, John
p.s. any other tips to make the site load faster will be appreciated.

See Theme Options -> Configure CSS & JS to make these files external

Use Wp Super Cache or WP Cache 2 as plugin, make sure you run a PHP cache like XCache, have mod_deflate (Apache 2) or mod_gzip (Apache 1) or Gzip (other webservers) enabled by the web host. The performance of the web server (hardware and software) and MySQL server can have a much greater impact than optimizations on the theme.

The center column content cannot be loaded before the left sidebar in this type of layout. This is the price for the better stability of this layout compared to "source ordered" DIV only, floated layouts. You'd have to put both sidebars on the right sidebars if you're concerned about the source order.

Combining all plugin CSS files into one CSS file and all plugin JS files into one JS would also help. PHP Speedy is supposed to do that. http://www.turleando.com.ar/autoptimize/ might be better according to http://andybeard.eu/2065/wordpress-comment-seo.html

Sorry to bug you on this, but I've been searching the forum and haven't been able to solve this for myself.

My blog (www.presentingmatters.com/blog) is still running very slow. I have made the CSS and JS an external file.

I'm confused about the advice about gzip. Is that a plug-in or do I call my host to make that adjustment?

Any advice is greatly appreciated!!!! Thanks bunches! :)

Gzip or mod_deflate is something the host would have to set or install

Hi Flynn,

Thank you for your suggestions, I will talk with my hosting company which is godaddy.

However, I have tried t turn CSS and JS files to external with horrible results. The blog just lost its shape. I am using supercache but the blog is still loading super slowly.

In IE it is even worse than Firefox and I am losing visitors. I don't know why IE behaves much worse, but it's close to impossible to go from one page to the next.

My blog is a CMS at http://www.WorldofDiets.com

Do you have any idea on how to make it fly?

Thanks
John

are you on a shared server or a dedicated one? That can make a big difference.

Your site is very fast on both IE and firefox for me. About 2 seconds page

According to pingdom, this twitter button is causing a slowdown

http://www.worldofdiets.com/%3C?phpb...buttons-06.png

Hi,

thank you for all your suggestions.

I removed the widget with the twitter button. However, it only appeared on the home page and the other pages were just as slow.

I'm surprised to read that for some of you the site loaded fast. It's super slow here and from other PCs I tried.

I will try to install the xcache plugin.

When I moved the CSS and JS files to external, the site lost its design. Any ideas on that?

I am running PHP widgets in the sidebars to run the navigation links, should I remove them to make the site run faster?

I will talk with the hosting company and see if they have any ideas.

I believe I'm on a shared hosting server at godaddy, but at 500-1000 visitors a day or so, I doubt if a dedicated server is merited, do you? Are any of you experiencing similar problems with godaddy? Godaddy also offers what they call virtual dedicated servers. Is that a worthwhile option?

Any more ideas on how to run the site faster would be great. Thank you guys so much for your advice?

what version of Atahualpa, WP and PHP/?

Hi,

I'm using WP 2.8.4

Atahualpa 3.4.2

PHP 4.3.11

First thiing I would do is upgrade to php5 - I think there is a setting you can add to the .htaccess file to do this - search the godaddy FAQ for directions. php4 will cause some problems

I am using W3 Total Cache and it has features to minify and compress code, plus page caching. I have no compatibility problems with Atahualpa (nor a bunch of other plugins I use) and find it an excellent way to provide Digg-protection plus speed.

The help file for Total Cache linked me to this superb free analysis tool, too, which identifies where the slowdowns might be.

Hi,

I changed the PHP version. It is now 5.2.5. The blog is still very slow. SOme of the pages take 5-6 seconds to load.

Is this W3 Total Cache any better than Super-cache. I also ran the diagnostic tool you suggested but can't figure out what it's saying or what can be done about the results.

As to Xcache, I'm not too techy, so I will probably have to hire someone to do this for me.

I am beginning to believe that this theme is just slower than others. Are you guys running fat loading blogs with it?

I'm now seeing 1-3 second load times - how much faster do you want it? (that was a retorical question :p)

That's strange. I'm getting 5-8 seconds

remember there are a ton of variables that will determine the time it takes for you to see the page.
- how fast is your computer?
- how many processes are running on it
- are you running hard wired or wireless
- - if wireless
- - - how fast is the wireless
- - - much interference is there on the channel you chose
- how fast is your connection to your isp
- how many hops is it from you to the computer the site is hosted on
- what kind of actrivity is going on at each machine along the way
- what the machine activity where your site is hosted
- if grabbing things from other sites (ad's feeds etc) how many hops to the source, speed on machines etc etc

if you have two computers at the same location but one is a 256meg 1.5 GZ machine running 100 processes, and the other is a 4gig 3Gz machine with basically nothing running, do you thiink the page loads will be the same?

tons of variables...

Okay, so...I did the external CSS and JS files. I had my host do the gzip-dmoz-thingy for Apache. My blog (www.presentingmatters.com/blog) is still running very slow. Could someone take a look at it and tell me if I'm completely missing something? Sorry I'm not the most technically-minded person, but I'm really hoping to solve this problem. Thank you to all of you who have helped. I really appreciate it!

Hi there. I just went to your site, and it did take a long time. You don't have the timer enabled (you can do that in the footer settings, to show the load time at the bottom of the page), but I'd say it took 7 or 8 seconds, at least, in Firefox on a fast cable connection at 8am.

One thing I noticed while watching the lower left corner of the browser as the page was loading: It seemed to hang for the longest time on Apture. I looked at your source code, and that appears to be the video embedded object. Have you tried the page without that in there?

That said, I also think the theme takes too long to load, compared to other themes I've tried.

one of the problems is that this image does not exist
and a lot of time is spent looking for it.

Also your 'body' background has this
change it to

Okie-dokie...I made the image adjustments that Juggledad suggested and added the timer paulae suggested into the source code. It says it takes about 7 seconds. Now, I hope I'm not crazy in wanting it to be closer to 2 or 3 seconds. Is there something I'm missing? I go to other sites with this theme and it doesn't take that long.

I REALLY appreciate all your help! Hoping to get this solved. Thanks!:)

According to your source code, you have a favicon, but I don't see one. The HTML is looking for one, and maybe that's causing some delay in initial loading of the page. Another thing I noticed is this: Browsers and Unix don't like Mac-style file names with spaces in them. I don't know if that causes any problems here or not, but I just noticed it.

sharialexander
your background gif is still formed wrong and you loose 3 seconds for it not to be found. Fix it!

BTY for anyone interested. I did a little test of a new site I'm working on - very basic - using Firebug and looking at the entire load time. I flushed the local cache each time - the times are in seconds.

1) CSS External/Java External - 2.82
2) CSS External/Java Internal - 2.45
3) CSS Internal/Java External - 2.29
4) CSS Internal/Java Internal - 1.64

so it added a lottle over a second if the CSS and Java was external. - food for thought

Interesting. I thought having CSS and JS external was supposed to make the site load faster, not slower!

I'm just reporting what I see, and it makes sence that it would take longer because extra requests would have to be made, although, maybe it is faster after the first load. If the css remains in the cache, then it won't have to be loaded a second time, so you save that time, but the first load will be slower.

everything is a trade off. Stop using photos and rotating headers and fancy effects and ad's and google tracking and java scripts and your site will load FAST...might look like h*** but it would load fast. Everything is a trade off.

You got that right, about trade-offs.

Another question: if I have CSS set to external, and I make a change via the CSS inserts, will the change automatically show up in the now-external CSS file?

it should, why are you seeing an issue?

Then I'm just confused. I changed the background gif. Copy and pasted what you had Juggledad. Paulae, I added the favicon, thanks for catching that.

I made my JS and CSS internal and tested it. It made the load time double. So, I'm going to keep it external.

Looks like we've gotten it down to 4.5ish seconds! Which is great, but it sure does seem like it takes longer than that in "real time".

If the apture is a hang up, then I guess that I can live with it being 4 seconds, but I sure would like it to be closer to 2 like Juggledad's. Any ideas?

JD, no, I'm not having a problem with that. Just wondering.

JD, about Shari's site: Is this weird?

A plugin is generating that sharethis code.

sharialexander, I'm getting 19 seconds to get it to load. Who is your host? Looking at it with Firebug, it seems most of the delay is waiting for the host to respond, so your probably on a shared server that is highly loaded.

Putting the CSS inline shouldn't cause that kind of problem.

I also notice that several of your images you are grabbing from an external site - that is extra time, why not make a copy and serve it locally

If you want it to run faster, get a faster Host - a dedicated server, trim the plugins.

I contacted my host earlier this morning. They are moving it to a faster server. They said to give it about 8 hours to go through. I too thought that might have been the issue. Hopefully, this time tomorrow the load time will be faster.

Don't have too many plugins, will see if I can trim.

Will definitely take your advice about the images!

I'll look at it tomorrow and see if there's any big changes.

Thanks again!

Wow, down to 4 seconds to load - just by switching it to a server that isn't as highly loaded.

This makes the point. It's not the software, it's the load on the hardware that causes most slowdowns. That is where the biggest gain will come from.

If you are paying $1.99/month (or $6.99) for hosting, you are going to see slow performance. No one is going to give you a dedicated server for that amount (they have to make money). Where I host my personal site I pay $10.00month - a dedicated server starts at $210/month - which do you think would give better response?

And you are still at the mercy of all those machines between you and the server and the load on them and there is nothing you can do about that issue...unfortuately

Which host do you use?

I use Westhost.net and have been very happy with them (if you go to them, name me as a referer and I think I get a free month)

Westnet:
Premium Hosting, $12.95/month

* 50GB Web Space
* 1000GB Bandwidth

Prohosting:
We're paying $34.95/month for Plan B: 2000MB storage and 50GB transfer, and we're up to 1911.60MB of disk usage and 3835.62MB of bandwidth usage. I'm attaching a screencap of our usage from our control panel.

I always have trouble figuring out these numbers. If you were us, would you switch hosts, knowing of the hassle it would be?

Well at Westhost, the business plan is $16.95/mo for 100GB storage and 2000GB bandwidth
you pay $34.95/mo for 2GB storage and 50GB bandwidth
so you are paying twice as much for 1/50th the storage and 1/40th the bandwidth or to put it another way, for half the monthly cost, you could get 50 times the storage and 40 times the bandwidth
or for $20 more per month, you could be on a semi dedicated server

but your right, there is the hasssle of switching

Hi I just found this post and I am having a problem with my site loading slow

http://www.paginadeinicio.com.mx/blog/

I am on a dedicated host 4 procesosrs and 16gigs of ram plenty of bandwidth and 500 gigs of storage so the server is very capable

I am runing WP Super Cache and DB Cache

but the site still loads extremly slow most the time and sometimes causes my whole servers MYsql to go down it has a huge server load

is it the theme that is causing the problem or what is wrong what can I do please any help would be appreciated

by the way not sure if this helps my host sent me this saying this might be part of the problem

3 admin2_pa localhost admin2_pag 3 Query SELECT * FROM wp_posts, wp_postmeta WHERE wp_posts.ID = wp_postmeta.post_id AND wp_postmeta.meta_key = '_pingme' LIMIT 1
11 admin2_pa localhost admin2_pag 3 Query SELECT * FROM wp_posts, wp_postmeta WHERE wp_posts.ID = wp_postmeta.post_id AND wp_postmeta.meta_key = '_pingme' LIMIT 1
15 admin2_pa localhost admin2_pag 3 Query SELECT * FROM wp_posts, wp_postmeta WHERE wp_posts.ID = wp_postmeta.post_id AND wp_postmeta.meta_key = '_pingme' LIMIT 1



But I don't understand this at all

Juggledad is great at troubleshooting these things.

One thing I notice is you're using DB Cache. I did too, for a while, until my hosting support guy told me it was causing errors. I got rid of it and things were a bit better.

Get rid of the cache files it creates, too.