Wordpress Performance
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- chrisrth
- Jr. Rocketeer
- Posts: 41
- Thanks: 1
- Love gantry. I can crush websites using the control and layout widgets but the perfomance kills me. I am not using any rockettheme themes, all original designs. I get constantly dogged by clients about slow load times and this is not the best for SEO either. I do a lot of sites, hundreds actually. I have dedicated servers, cloud servers, virtual servers. Dynamic sites, database driven sites, static sites and dozens of wp sites (although relatively new to WP). I am ony stating this because I don't want to get into some banter about my server/host settings or newb issues or common .htaccess, cache settings, etc....Been there, done that. I have caching enabled in htaccess, gantry zipper and caching plugins installed but my gantry sites still tend to be the absolute slowest of any site I host whether WP or not. I even have the PHP mem limit up to 72M and still get the occasional 500 error when using the admin. I can deal with the admin being slow but the front end is what is troublesome. If I can't find some easy workarounds I will have to look for another framework. Ganrty loads a lot of extras but I've stayed away from removing components like feeds and other items because I don't have time to "re-fix" when a new update comes out. One of the biggest issues is the fact that I use jquery and gantry uses mootools so I need to load both. It would be great to remove the gantry menu and mootols but not sure if that will break something else. Really looking for some easy performance boosting suggestions that wont cause a lot of pain with future gantry updates. Any suggestions?
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- Cliff Pfeifer
- Preeminent Rocketeer
- Posts: 8444
- Thanks: 20
- Website Developer
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Can you provide a link to one of these sites so we can see it?
The hosting / server "banter", as you call it, is the number one reason for slow website performance hands down. I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss that as a possibility. Our demo website runs literally hundreds of full Gantry theme installs, simultaneously, on 2 different platforms while getting pounded with high traffic 24/7. It's a touch sluggish with the demo chooser on, but even that load time isn't too bad.
You just have to consider that you have the exact same thing we do, but on a much smaller scale. The only difference is your environment, all the files and codes are the same in both places.
If you want us to look at what you've got, you need to provide a link. Without seeing it, all I can do is guess, - The difficult we do immediately, the impossible takes a little longer.
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- chrisrth
- Jr. Rocketeer
- Posts: 41
- Thanks: 1
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I know you are busy, before I have you wasting time trying to find bottlenecks let's talk specifics. Like I said, I love it, It's just slower than most other WP installs using the same htaccess directives, compression and cache plugins on the same host (rackspace).
The gantry menu is nice but at a cost since I never use mootools so I have to load the extra library. I understand that your plugins most likely will not run. That is not a concern since I use gantry mainly for the widgets and overrides and use jQuery ui for effects.
Is there an easy way to easily remove mootools integration? I am ok having to remove again when gantry is updated. I just don't want to break anything
I've tried many css tools to combine and compress the multiple css files used by gantry. do you know of any that work?
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- Cliff Pfeifer
- Preeminent Rocketeer
- Posts: 8444
- Thanks: 20
- Website Developer
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You probably could remove mootools, but it would be extremely complicated and none of our products that use js would work at all if you did - Not just menus and content rotators - but Gantry front and backend. I would say attempting to do so would be an extremely bad idea, unless you feel like filling in the blanks with jQuery on your own.
None of the fixes you are mentioning for speeding up the website will have any effect on your database server - which is generally the cause of site loading delays. A lot of times with this situation the delay comes when the URL is trying to connect to the database, AKA server latency. Once it connects - the site loads as normal. If that is what's happening, all the file removal, compression, caching and PHP settings in the world won't change it because that's not what is causing the issue.
Provide a link and I'll tell you if that is what's happening or not. - The difficult we do immediately, the impossible takes a little longer.
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- katandmouse
- Hero Rocketeer
- Posts: 460
- Thanks: 1
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I'm very interested in this discussion because of the load time issues I've been having with vanilla.com. I'd like to add that when vanilla.com's site/server is running well, it's blazingly fast for what it has to load, sometimes under 2 seconds, so I'm not sure the slow load is gantry. Otherwise, wouldn't it be slow all/most of the time?
I've been turning off plugins and getting results from that. We were getting load times of 30 seconds periodically. It was really bad. Still having problems though. I'll post a new thread on that. Has to do with cache errors in the logs and seeing corresponding time outs as a result.
So my recommendation is check your error logs.
As for SEO, I get great results. But load time will ruin that in a heartbeat.
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- katandmouse
- Hero Rocketeer
- Posts: 460
- Thanks: 1
- As mentioned I report cache errors in my previous post. Super Cache was NOT turned on but the gantry caching and zip was. I reversed those and the site slowed WAY DOWN. I just turned off Super Cache and it speeded up. Turned on Gantry caching and the speed is still good. But I'm not going to turn the zip on until I know for sure there are no errors. From what I just saw Super Cache may not be compatible with Gantry unless there is another plugin in there that is causing those two to complain.
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- katandmouse
- Hero Rocketeer
- Posts: 460
- Thanks: 1
- I moved a site over to gossamerthreads.com, the same guys who wrote the GT Metrix test tool, for hosting and the speed difference is phenomenal! They really know how to configure a server!!! Highly recommended for Rockettheme sites.
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