[Resolved] GeneratePress is slow, even when installed locally

[Philip]

Hello. My question is: why does GeneratePress update my changes so slowly?

I realize this is a pretty general question, but if I try to customize anything using GeneratePress customization, such as header color or layout – anything – each change takes 8 or 9 seconds to implement. And this is with a fresh install of WordPress, installed locally on my laptop using WAMP and with no added plugins except GP Premiun. It gets very tedious when doing a lot of changes to a new site.

I have a custom-built laptop which was literally the fastest you could buy two years ago. Without going into details, it cost $2500 so that gives you some idea (a lesser Dell equivalent was $3,500)! It is blazingly fast and I would expect with a local install I could work really fast with building WordPress sites.

[Tom]

Hi there,

It definitely shouldn’t be by default.

Is there any content on your pages, or is it a completely default install?

What browser are you using? Any extensions added to the browser at all?

It should take 1-3 seconds to reload after changes, but 8 or 9 is way too long.

What happens if you deactivate GP Premium? Or even just individual add-ons on “Appearance > GeneratePress”?

[Philip]

Hi Tom

Yes, it is a totally clean install with no plug-ins except for GP Premium.

Base colors change instantly, but when I go into colors in GP Premium and change individual items it can take 8 1/2 to 12 1/2 seconds for the color to change (I used a stopwatch to time it). Very tedious.

I turned off a few of the extensions in GP Premium that might be less useful, but no noticeable effect.

I am using Chrome with the extensions Adblock, Blur, Dashlane (password manager), Dragon Web Extension, ezLinkPreview, Google Calendar, Google Cast, Google Docs Offline, Google Quick Scroll, Google Similar Pages, Google Translate, MightyText, PageRuler, TooManyTabsforChrome, Weather(extension)

[Tom]

Can you try using Chrome without any extensions/a browser that doesn’t have any. I’m assuming those extensions may be slowing down the site.

When you refresh the regular page (no customizer), does it take that long?

[Philip]

Hi Tom. I use Internet Explorer 11, which I normally never use and which has no extensions at all, and colour changes still take an half seconds (changing the colour of my main content text).

[SCIP]

If it helps, I do find hosting locally on servers such as WAMP can be slow. There can be a lot of other things going on which slows down the server on your computer.

If you can get hold of some cheap hosting for development you will get a more realistic speed.

I build lots of sites and generatepress is fastfast.

[Philip]

Hi Tom.

That last message was amazingly garbled. I meant to say that I tried Internet Explorer 11, with no extensions whatsoever (I don’t normally use Internet Explorer) and color changes are still taking around 10 seconds on localhost.

Typography changes are about 6 seconds, online and off.

I recognize that there could be an endless number of causes. I just didn’t know what the baseline was supposed to be, but times and getting seem to be unreasonably slow. I’m still puzzled.

Thanks for the comments Mark. I do have an online website based on GeneratePress hosted by BlueHost, which is reputed to be one of the best hosting websites. When I make colour changes there, they take 8 to 12 seconds to implement and typography changes take 6 seconds (as mentioned). The sluggish behaviour was one of the reasons I decided to host my site locally. So I am puzzled to see there was not much difference between local hosting and online hosting.

[Tom]

Is there any chance you can send me a temporary admin account to that bluehost WordPress installation to support@generatepress.com? Would help if I could witness it first-hand.

Thanks!

[Tom]

Looks like this was a combination of certain plugins slowing the site down and a few WAMP settings that needed to be tweaked.

Everything is back to normal speed now 🙂

[Philip]

Hi Tom

Thanks for all the help here and via email! The problem is resolved!

Online, I just had too many unused plug-ins. Disabling them fixed slow performance working online. So the problem had nothing to do with GP.

Locally, adjusting power settings in Windows Control Panel to “high performance” doubled and tripled the speed of changes I made under WAMP. No more sluggish performance. For anyone with similar problems, check out https://www.devside.net/wamp-server/wamp-is-running-very-slow

Thanks again Tom. I have never encountered better tech support and from the main man too!

[Tom]

Glad I was able to help – thanks for posting the solution for future users! 🙂

[David]

Please share the setting you adjusted. I am having the same issue but with MAMP.

[Tom]

He mentioned it here: https://generatepress.com/forums/topic/generatepress-is-sluggish-even-when-installed-locally/#post-139445

Seemed to be the power settings for his laptop. There’s also an article on it above 🙂

[Philip]

Hi David

I shared a link, but it is for WAMP and you are using MAMP which is for Apple. On a PC I changed the power setting to high performance and also tried the long list of other things they suggested, but that is what seemed to make a noticeable difference. So, I suggest you Google MAMP for slow performance and see if you can find something similar. You have to spend the time testing different suggestions to see what works. This is all pretty much black-box to me and I just follow suggestions, with basically no understanding of why they work.

[David]

I found a fix here: https://www.bram.us/2011/12/12/mamp-pro-slow-name-resolving-with-local-vhosts-in-lion-fix/

Thanks!

[Author]

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