Gantry accounts for 88%+ of my websites slow DL speed
-
-
- Roz
- Hero Rocketeer
- Posts: 329
- Thanks: 1
-
I am finding some troubleing information regarding the Gantry framework. I have been using Rocket Themes for years, I love how much Gantry affords me the freedom to create lush and original looking websites and I am very happy with the support staff and how they help me when I need assistance. But now I am finding out that it is also the cause of most of my latest problems.
One example is this site, which is built off the Chimera theme with all the Rok plugins deleted (I am honestly not a fan of them at all, they are far too overly complicated and slow)
eckertgroup.com
With the new Google changes, Mobile Friendly Layouts and Download Times are both the main topics of conversation with all my clients. Working with other Wordpress sites, I have been able to clean up a site, use W3 Total Cache, Minify CSS and JS, etc to increase their DL speeds up to around 94/100 whicjh rocks! I even offered all my clients a flat fee offer that guarunteed these results. The only problem is that I have NEVER been able to get my RT/Gantry sites past 71/100 and it's been very frustrating.
So I downloaded P3 Performance Profiler (WP Plugin) and checked one of my sites. Imagine my suprise when I saw that "Gantry Template Framework" accounted for almost ALL of the problems with my websites speed. look at these results:
Report date: May 26, 2015
Theme name: Eckert
Pages browsed: 6
Avg. load time: 7.5769 sec
Number of plugins: 15
Plugin impact: 92.27% of load time
Avg. plugin time: 6.9911 sec
Avg. core time: 0.4068 sec
Avg. theme time: 0.0143 sec
Avg. mem usage: 58.67 MB
Avg. ticks: 39,104
Avg. db queries : 15.67
Margin of error : 0.1647 sec
Plugin list:
===========================================
P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler) - 0.0055 sec - 0.08%
Accordion Shortcodes - 0.0009 sec - 0.01%
Contact Form 7 - 0.0609 sec - 0.87%
Falconiform YouTube Widget - 0.0011 sec - 0.02%
Gantry Template Framework - 6.2170 sec - 88.93%
My Custom CSS - 0.0017 sec - 0.02%
Official Statcounter Plugin For Wordpress - 0.0012 sec - 0.02%
Really Simple CAPTCHA - 0.0034 sec - 0.05%
TinyMCE Advanced - 0.0070 sec - 0.10%
Typecase - 0.0024 sec - 0.03%
UpdraftPlus - Backup/Restore - 0.0603 sec - 0.86%
W3 Total Cache Purge All Post - 0.0004 sec - 0.01%
W3 Total Cache - 0.4372 sec - 6.25%
Wordpress Seo - 0.1828 sec - 2.62%
Wp Robots Txt - 0.0093 sec - 0.13%
After finding this, I googled the problem and of course I have found that questions about download times and gantry have been going on for a couple years. Is there anyting I can do to rectify this problem? If I can't fix this, I am honestly going to have to find a new way to build websites, I am dealing with several clients who are now testing their website speed on their own using the google page speed insights - developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ and they are giving me a hard time for not being able to get them more dl speed.
The bottom line is that I need to find a way to get my RocketTheme websites up to 90/100 speeds in googles speed tester or I am going to have to find another option for themes and support. Honestly I really like you guys, I like the original ideas your theme designers come up with and I like the reasonably fast and extremely helpful support... but this is a huge issue for me
Any ideas to get my speeds up?
look at the data results of my speeds on multiple RT websites - Last Edit: 9 years 10 months ago by Roz.
-
-
-
- Matt
- Preeminent Rocketeer
- Posts: 22268
- Thanks: 3224
- messin' with stuff
-
Gantry is big, it makes (and has to adhere to) the Word Press system amazingly easy to use and build highly customized websites, as you also expressed.
This comes at a cost, and page load speed can certainly bare some of that cost. I am typically able to get 3-5 second page load speeds on my Gantry WordPress Sites... sub 1 second, depending on content, once the page is cached, running Wordpress Fastest Cache... the biggest factors (assuming memory isn't ever peaking out) are always CPU, Bandwidth, and Distance.
Gantry loads ALL of your content, all Widgets, all Posts, all Pages... so it's naturally going to take the longest to run as it builds the page.
So... all that being said... I'm not sure how Gantry would interfere with Download Times other than loading the page the download is hosted on... that's assuming user interaction to download the file... assuming a downloaded file is accessed directly Gantry wouldn't even be in the loop... download speed is much more influenced by server hardware (and of course bandwidth and a clean network path) than reallyanymuch server software; WordPress and Gantry included...
They guys are always working... Gantry 5 is pretty amazing and coming to WordPress soon... it's a whole different animal, from the ground up, and is much much faster... lots of info on our blog, gantry.org, and our YouTube. - Last Edit: 9 years 10 months ago by Matt.
- SEARCH the forum first! These boards are rich in knowledge and vast in topics. This includes searching just the 'Solved' forums, using Google, and using ChatGPT
-
-
-
- Roz
- Hero Rocketeer
- Posts: 329
- Thanks: 1
- In the meantime, and to deal with all the sites/templates not using gantry 5, is there any ways we can speed it up? Can I disable any of it or parts of it somehow? The site I used as an example is only 6 simple pages of content (yes using gantry widgets), Im only using a fraction of the framework, could I turn off other things somehow perhaps? anyting to bring my speed up some more is helpfull, Ive already dealt with caching, minify, server time, etc. I just need to cut the Gantry time down some more.
-
-
-
- Matt
- Preeminent Rocketeer
- Posts: 22268
- Thanks: 3224
- messin' with stuff
-
you're never using a "fraction" of the Framework... Gantry outputs and orders (manages to a degree) 100%* of your content
WordPress isn't a terribly fast platform to begin with... but at the end of the day if you throw enough processing power at it and you have a clean network path you should be able to achieve the page load speeds that I normally experience and I posted about previously.
For any future users reading this thread I still maintain that Gantry has nothing to do with download speeds... it would only/can only affect page load times.
What a lightning fast CMS? Check out getgrav.org/ - SEARCH the forum first! These boards are rich in knowledge and vast in topics. This includes searching just the 'Solved' forums, using Google, and using ChatGPT
-
-
-
- Roz
- Hero Rocketeer
- Posts: 329
- Thanks: 1
- To a client that doesnt understand how all this works, there isnt any different between "Download Speed" and "Pageload Times". So the semantics dont help the situation any, the bottom line is that Gantry slows down the loading of pages considerable more than anything else available for WordPress that Ive used. I look forward to the new Gantry 5 but Im going to have to be very cautious of it at first and test it a lot before I start building sites on it. But Im still left havintg to explain to my RT cleints why Im not going to be able to ever get passed 70/100 in my page speeds
-
-
-
- Matt
- Preeminent Rocketeer
- Posts: 22268
- Thanks: 3224
- messin' with stuff
-
It's not semantics, it's fact.... it's technology... it's cold hard software and hardware 0's and 1s... Page Load Time ≠ Download Time
Gantry "takes the longest" because it's the first AND the last to load... it's loading everything... If you weren't using Gantry you'd see WordPress core functions "take the longest" to load and then you'd be blaming WordPress...
Google's Page Speed Insights gives you explicit instructions on what it wants to see fixed... I've never seen it do a "download test" so I'm not sure what metric you're actually concerned with here...
The hardest to overcome is it's "render blocking css/js" metric... which is sorta bull... if you have a slider on your home page for example that loads "above the fold" then you NEED the js/css responsible for that slider to load in order to render that content... You can hardcode those scripts to load asynchronously but then you actually hurt the user experience IMO because the site loads then a second or 2 later your slider pops in... Other than that metric I've personally been able to overcome PSI's other tests and hit scores of 75-79/100
I have more than a few sites ranking page 1 for their respective keywords with PSI scores ranging from 50/100 to 79/100... content is still king in the SEO game and while page load times certainly matter a less-than-100%-optimized site with killer content will still outrank a 100%-optimized site with lesser content... and so long as you're mobile friendly you'll rank the same, or better, on Mobiles.
/2cents - Last Edit: 9 years 10 months ago by Matt.
- SEARCH the forum first! These boards are rich in knowledge and vast in topics. This includes searching just the 'Solved' forums, using Google, and using ChatGPT
-
-
-
- Roz
- Hero Rocketeer
- Posts: 329
- Thanks: 1
- Seems Ive hit a nerve here but to someone that doesnt understand the difference between the 2, they couldnt care about the details that go over there head, and only care about "Why is the site you designed for me take so much longer to load than any website I have ever had" which I have got 3 times now. Im saying nothing out there increases the wait time for a page to display like Gantry does, and now that clients are at a place where they are testing these things themselves and mobile friendly / page load/display times are in the fore-front of conversations between web designers and clients, it IS an issue, whether its called download speeds, or page speeds. My original questions was, how can I increase the speed of Gantry based RT websites, and the answer seems to be, I cant. so I guess thats my answer. The rest is just debate about details.
- Last Edit: 9 years 10 months ago by Roz.
-
-
-
- Matt
- Preeminent Rocketeer
- Posts: 22268
- Thanks: 3224
- messin' with stuff
-
Please don't take any offense in my posts as none was intended... no nerve's been hit; sometimes I might speak too directly/bluntly and I apologize. I'm trying to address the concerns raised in the original post directly... from a technology standpoint Gantry is not involved in the downloading of files... users clicking on a 'download link' in a site to download a file wouldn't experience any interruption from Gantry, or anything in Core WordPress, after they've clicked that link.
If you want to talk about page load times, that's fine, but it's not the title of this thread.
Gantry is big in order to allow the level of flexibility that it does to publish and order content with a high level of user friendliness. It does utilize it's own built-in cache along with LESS compiling and compression of CSS for speed benefits. The codebase has been maintained and improved for years with frequent releases.
Gantry is GPL... there's lots of information on gantry.org, Google Groups, and now on github about the source code of which you are always welcome to modify to suit your needs.
As I stated previously I have, and am having, good luck with WordPress Fastest Cache along with my current server environment in creating WordPress sites with Gantry that initially load 3-5 seconds and subsequently load at sub 1 second.
There's tons of other documentation out there on optimizing images/scripts/files for optimal delivery... the faster all these things can load, the faster Gantry will load too...
hopefully some of that helps. - SEARCH the forum first! These boards are rich in knowledge and vast in topics. This includes searching just the 'Solved' forums, using Google, and using ChatGPT
-
-
-
- 8degrees
- Rocketeer
- Posts: 80
- Thanks: 3
-
Hey Dude Check this out > >
www.jch-optimize.net/
I didnt read all the posts too extensive, but this plugin is my go-to system to speed up my sites. Give it a try trust me it works smooth and the settings superb, and is not that expensive, like $10 bucks.
Cheers. -
The following users have thanked you: Matt
-
Time to create page: 0.074 seconds