[Resolved] Website super slow after WP 4.5.1 upgrade

[Patricia]

Hi!

I’m fairly certain this is NOT a GeneratePress issue, but I’ve googled my problem and found that many people are experiencing this, but as of yet there is no (published) solution. : / I’m hoping perhaps somebody in the GP community might have some insight…

Has anybody else experienced *ridiculous* site slowdown since upgrading to WordPress version 4.5.1? My website consistently loaded in under 2 seconds until this update, and now it takes 17 seconds on a good day (normally between 20 – 30 seconds!).

I’ve talked to my host and they haven’t been able to help with this issue, other than to offer tips on site optimization.

As a web designer, this is pretty embarrassing (LOL). If anybody has advice, it is more than welcome! 🙂

Thank you!!! 🙂

p.s. My other GeneratePress and non-GeneratePress sites that have *not* been upgraded to 4.5.1 still load super fast, thankfully.

[Tom]

Hmm, I can’t think of anything in 4.5.1 that would slow down your site.

Have you tried running it through this tool? http://tools.pingdom.com

It should pinpoint where the slow load time is coming from.

[Patricia]

Thanks for the reply! 🙂

Oddly enough, however, the objective speed testers (such as pingdom) rank my website pretty decently (hovering around the 2 second mark, generally). But in actual user experience, it is dreadfully slow. :/ The only exception is the Safari browser on Mac – it seems to perform well there. But on phones, chrome, and firefox, let’s just say there’s time to fix a snack and come back before the website pops up, haha! http://www.webgirldesigns.com/

I’ll keep digging for answers…

[Tom]

It loaded very fast for me in Chrome.

Maybe you have something going on with your internet connection? Have you asked a friend to load it from their house?

[Patricia]

Hmmm… and the plot thickens… haha!

Yes, I’ve asked a few people at different areas of the state (CA) to check, and the consensus was PC = slow, iPhones & Androids = slow, Mac (w/Safari browser) = fast.

Looking at a few options right now….

[Patricia]

Followup: Most of the people for whom the website was loading slowly are finding vast improvements as of this afternoon (one by one, over the last hour. Woohoo! 🙂 Thank you for looking into this and sending some ideas. Hopefully it’s just one of those things where it has to propagate (??? or something like that, haha), and it’ll be back up to its fast performance for everybody soon.

Thanks again! And I’m still loving this theme (and the support)!!!

🙂 Patricia

[Tom]

No problem!

If it continues to happen, it may be your server/hosting.

Hope it continues working as it should 🙂

[Jessica]

I am experiencing the SAME problem on 2 different sites and the sites take so long to load… I’ve never experienced this before. When running through the pingdom test, I’m getting me a TON of .js references and a 12 second load time – an F rating. I can’t even load my own site on the server (front or backend dashboard) without wanting to throw my comptuer out the window. I’ve tried on and off my internet connect, on 2 computers, my ipad and my phone (both on and off wi-fi conection) and something definitely happened recently that is causing this.

The Pingdom test message I received:
Resources with a “?” in the URL are not cached by some proxy caching servers. Remove the query string and encode the parameters into the URL for the following resources:

With the following list of files referenced:
–> These are all GP files
/wp-content/plugins/gp-pr … rate-blog/functions/css/style.min.css?ver=1.2.86
/wp-content/plugins/gp-pr … nu-plus/functions/css/sliiide.min.css?ver=1.2.86
/wp-content/plugins/gp-pr … enu-plus/functions/css/sticky.min.css?ver=1.2.86
/wp-content/plugins/gp-pr … u-plus/functions/js/navigation.min.js?ver=1.2.86
/wp-content/plugins/gp-pr … menu-plus/functions/js/sliiide.min.js?ver=1.2.86
/wp-content/plugins/gp-pr … -menu-plus/functions/js/sticky.min.js?ver=1.2.86
/wp-content/plugins/gp-pr … dary-nav/functions/css/mobile.min.css?ver=1.2.86
/wp-content/plugins/gp-pr … ondary-nav/functions/css/style.min.css?ver=4.5.3
/wp-content/plugins/gp-pr … ry-nav/functions/js/navigation.min.js?ver=1.2.86
/wp-content/plugins/gp-pr … e-sections/functions/css/style.min.css?ver=4.5.3
/wp-content/plugins/gp-pr … sections/functions/js/parallax.min.js?ver=1.3.31
/wp-content/themes/generatepress/css/font-awesome.min.css?ver=4.6.3
/wp-content/themes/generatepress/css/mobile.min.css?ver=1.3.31
/wp-content/themes/generatepress/css/unsemantic-grid.min.css?ver=1.3.31
/wp-content/themes/generatepress/js/dropdown.min.js?ver=1.3.31
/wp-content/themes/generatepress/style.css?ver=1.3.31

–> This is MY custom style sheet
/wp-content/themes/lfh/style.css?ver=1467756961

–> These are core WP files
/wp-includes/js/jquery/jquery-migrate.min.js?ver=1.4.1
/wp-includes/js/jquery/jquery.js?ver=1.12.4
/wp-includes/js/wp-embed.min.js?ver=4.5.3
/wp-includes/js/wp-emoji-release.min.js?ver=4.5.3

In total, this particular site is reporting Load time of 12.38s, Which is at least 10x longer than it should be considering I haven’t even added anything yet to this site.

The other site has 3x the number of errors (similar to above).

This is definitely not just a WP error and I’m not sure what to do b/c one of the sites is live (the other is a dev site so I have time to figure it out) but still… this is new and only happening on the GP sites 🙁

• This reply was modified 7 years, 9 months ago by Jessica.

[Tom]

Query strings definitely won’t cause that kind of load time.

I also highly doubt it’s GP, as it would be happening to a lot of sites, including this one.

I actually just wrote a post on optimization, you can find it here: https://generatepress.com/fastest-wordpress-theme/

There might be some tips in there that help you.

However, if I had to guess, I would say one of two things are doing this to your site.

a) Some rogue plugin you have installed. Try installing a plugin called “Query Monitor”, it will spit out any errors which might be causing the issue.

b) Your server – load time is highly dependent on your server/hosting. Shared hosting can be brutal, as it could be another site on your server (someone else’s site) hogging up all of the resources, slowing your site down.

You can contact your hosting to see if they can see the issue, and if not, you can request that they move your site to a different server.

Hopefully this helps – slow websites are frustrating.

[Jessica]

I appreciate your comments and suggestions but some of the things you’re suggesting were already donw or don’t exist. Even after waiting 3 minutes just for the dashboard to load and then deactivating or removing plugins, I’m having a hair-pulling problem – only on the sites I built with GP. I was already using Comet Cache which has improved every other site I’ve ever built load in less than a second. It’s not doing anything to speed things up here.

The load time is so long on these 2 sites I can barely wait to even see what happens or it times out. It’s like being on dial up.

The errors spit out by the Pingdom test specifically reference all the css files in the GP theme and the pro plugin.

Also, removing FontAwesome totally removes the fact that I’m using FontAwesome – so that will negate the areas that utilize it.

All due respect, there has to be something unique to the GP files causing the conflict b/c I’m not experiencing any of this on any of the other at least 10-20 sites I’ve built with a different framework. I can’t point fingers at the server/host when none of the other sites on this host are hanging and have WAY more content, resources etc than these these 2 which do not even share the same server.

I’ve just never had a site take over 12 seconds to load before so this is baffling (and like I said, isolated to this new theme/builder).

[Tom]

Hi Jessica,

The Autoptimize plugin will combine the GP files you mentioned into one file.

Pingdom is only mentioning those files because of the query strings (?ver=1.4.1) at the end of the files.

The Query Strings section of that post shows you how to remove those.

I don’t deny something is going on with your sites, however I find it hard to point the finger at GP when there’s 40,000 active installs and no one else is mentioning an issue like this.

Once the query strings are removed, Pingdom will no longer mention those files, which are just CSS files – they won’t slow down your website (at least noticeably).

Waiting 3 minutes for the Dashboard to load (GP doesn’t load anything in your Dashboard) isn’t normal, and doesn’t have anything to do with a theme (GP or any other theme).

Install this plugin: https://wordpress.org/plugins/query-monitor/

It will give you a better idea of what’s going on – whether it’s a plugin, your WordPress installation or GP – I’m more than happy to help you get it sorted.

[Tom]

Off to bed now, almost 1am.

I’ll check back first thing in the morning – hopefully Query Monitor will give us a hint we can work with.

[Ramesh Srinivasan]

Just my 2 cents:

I’m on a shared hosting with SiteGround, and running GP Premium. My site is blazing fast (first load 1 to 1.5 secs usually, and repeat visits at 500ms to 750ms) after several optimizations, including:

– Using Cache Enabler Plugin from KeyCDN, with the advanced configuration snippet that you add to .htaccess.
– Autoptimize – Aggregage, minify, concatenate CSS/JS, and moved the CSS/JS to Amazon CloudFront
– Removed unwanted Plugins
– Added my site to Cloudflare, and later switched to a WAF solution CDN.

In Pingdom, you should be looking at the DNS seek time, Waiting time as well as the Download time. There is not much you can do about DNS delay, but you can attach your site to CloudFlare for lightning fast (Time to First Byte) TTFB as well as overall delivery time. Cloudflare has an option where you can set it to ignore query strings, and cache the entire site using a Page Rule.

Personally GP is a fantastic light-weight theme, and support is very good. If you can post the Pingdom results page here, someone will take a look.

[Jessica]

I’ll install the Autoptimizer plugin and see what it says, if I can get anything to load at all. The waiting is absolutely horrific. Like I said, the front end of the website won’t load either… not just the dashboard/dashboard. I just sit and wait over 3 minutes for anything to load. So I’m going to have to rebuild the whole site if this doesn’t work. I’ve even disabled every plugin and nothing is working.
(note: waiting for the Autoptimize settings page alone is taking more than 3 minutes to load)

[Jessica]

Ramesh Srinivasan: All things you mentioned have been done.

These 2 sites are my first any only experience with GP and the only ones I’m having this issue with. I’ve disabled everything. I do this for a living – design/develop sites – so I’m no stranger to optimizing things.

Something is wrong and nothing I’ve done is any different than any of the other way more robust sites I’ve built for clients. Thanks for your 2 cents. These 2 sites will not load in less than 12 seconds with absolutely NO plugins enabled, with the caching plugin, etc.

I can not confidently build a 3rd site for this huge client I have knowing this is a potential issue. I’m really frustrated. It’s a little challenging to try some of these fixes though, when it takes 3 minutes to get one page to load just to see if a plugin can be installed, and then another 3 minutes for it to activate… another 3 minutes to tell me nothing or do nothing.

I’m not a novice. I have already confirmed that NONE of my other sites are having an issue.

I already posted the results that the only “error” or “issue related areas” of the load test were directly indicating something on the GP side so I guess it’s just my host. Sigh.

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