Newspaper theme causing long server wait

Hi everybody,

I’m experiencing the same issue on 2 servers (different providers, different location) whereas both are running wordpress with the newspaper theme.

Here’s 2 screenshots, the first is running with newspaper theme, the second one with a theme called newsberg.

Newspaper theme https://prnt.sc/vvswea
Other theme https://prnt.sc/vvswy3

The only change was activating a different theme, everything else staid identical.

I’d really appreciate if someone has an idea what’s causing these problems, since it’s definitely not due to hosting (as it’s experienced on 2 different servers).

Looking forward to any suggestions.

After testing the plugins a bit, it seems the TagDiv standard pack is the culprit. Deactivating this plugin solves the issue, but obviously the design / layout of the page changes too.

Is there any solution to configure everything as wished and then deactivate the standard pack to get a reasonable loading time? Adding over 1 second of wait just due to this plugin doesn’t seem a viable option.

Hey Calin, going to try this.

Is there any way in which I could ‘save’ the current layout and settings I have and disable the standard pack? Or somehow disable unused contents of the standard pack?

If I go with what you suggested, the drag and drop builder wouldn’t be available anymore correct?

If the cloud library is that much light weight and faster, wouldn’t it be an option to simply make all layouts available through cloud library, to avoid us using the version which pretty much slows down heavily? From what I’ve seen, not all elements from some themes, for example SayWhat theme, are available in the library?

Also any other tip what I could do to avoid the bad performance with standard pack? I’m running it on a 32GB RAM, E5-1650v3 CPU ( 6 cores / 21 threads ), 2x240GB SSD + RAID-1 server with dedicated up/down line, so I think it’s fair to say it should be more than enough ressource wise.

Can we expect the full standard pack to be included in cloud library? I mean given the data, the benefit of the full standard pack seems very limited as it doesn’t seem to be reasonable in terms of ressources at all 🙁

I am also experiencing a massive slow down site-wide since the November update. My site flipped overnight to all our pages failing on Google console, all thanks to the upgrade. This is clearly a development issue on your end guys, please fix it. It’s unfair to expect your customers to resolve this with workarounds and the new update hasn’t addressed it, in fact, it now seems worse.

We have a large site running on Newspaper and we are going to be seriously pissed if we have to take it down to change templates.
How long is this going to take to resolve as it is affecting our rankings on Google and I am sure many of your other customers are wasting time trying to resolve it. Clearly, it’s a known issue you should be advising customers about.
Sorry, but I am seriously pissed off at this point. We have wasted hours trying to optimize code to resolve this. Please let me know when you expect this to be fixed.

Fkvs, You can put it on a rocketship, it isn’t going to make the slightest difference, trust me, we have tried pretty much everything. It’s a scripting issue that arose with 10.3.8 and they still haven’t resolved it. It simply kills the page load speed when the page is served and you can minify all you like, move things to the footer, it still sucks.

Some of our pages, the front page included are now taking between 5 and 9s to render, depending on how we optimize. It’s an issue Tagdiv needs to resolve and they’ll have to backtrack to see what they did in the November update that stuffed things up. A solution is possibly trying to roll back to release 10.3.7 but that also now has issues thanks to Woocommerce.

Yes I agree, the server I described is, politely said, overpowered for running a site on it unless you’re loaded with visitors. In addition, all images are heavily optimized and compressed, no external content being loaded (we tested this during the load tests we did).

Do you have any guide to roll back? I just wanna make sure nothing gets destroyed when doing so, since that’d be obviously the worst case and something every webmaster needs to avoid.

• This reply was modified 5 years by fkvs.

Honestly, I would avoid wasting any more of your time and rather put pressure on tagDiv to sort it out. Until it’s fixed, they are selling an oxcart for a theme, snails could pass it, and they are aware of that. Their entire catalog of older templates that rely on the plugin is effectively useless. You cant use them and if you have, then you have a serious problem. Like we do. Telling us to switch to a Pro theme is an impractical copout.

Be interesting to see how they respond and if they do in fact issue a warning to their new customers about this issue and notify existing customers rather than leave them in the dark and struggling like idiots.

If you’re going to try the rollback I’d only suggest it if you haven’t updated to the latest WordPress. Backup your database and then just rollback. If it bombs, you can often recover by reinstalling the newer version and manually activating the theme plugins from the theme pages.

So you’re seriously considering not updating a valid option and describing a picture where there is no problem with the standard pack?

Sorry but saying standard pack is for people who consider not to upgrade sounds really like an excuse and very far from reality (if you check the posts of people in this forum, it seems to be a very common problem).

Forgot to add – so there are no plans that all templates would be available on cloud library anytime soon?

Hi Vlad. Our web address is Medika.life.

Also, it would be really helpful if the update wasn’t full of bugs. We are trying to upgrade templates and none of the images will upload. So fixing the problem is currently impossible.

I believe that I am also experiencing similar issues.
When I de-activate Cloud library, Pingdom shows that the Page size is reduced by 500KB and a reduction of 17 load requests.

When I activate Cloud Library plugin, WordPress admin functions slow down to unusable levels and cPanel statistics report the following for over 2 minutes:
– I/O usage = 100%
– Physical Memory 512MB = 100%
– CPU = 98%

I have re-installed the Newspaper Pro Theme and all the plugins, the problem occurs again every time Cloud Library is activated.

You can say a lot of good things about Newspaper but suggesting it’s fast is just complete rubbish. It’s one of the slowest themes we use and I’m sitting with over 400 pages on Search Console flagged as being slow, and not just a little either. Definitely issues.

We use a pro theme, having updated because Tagdiv suggested the old themes were slow. Marginal improvement. So little as not to be noticeable.

I’m waiting for their next update that will apparently address Core Web Vitals, which was supposed to be released last week. I seriously hope it will help. If not, I’m going to have to switch to GeneratePress Premium XD

• This reply was modified 5 years by Joseph Brown.

just want to throw my weight behind this as well

getting a lot of issues from this – CLS has shot up through the roof on both Mobile and desktop.

I agree with you guys. Newspaper is sold like a Flash Fast theme but performances are very disappointing.
I’ve tried all kinds of optimization with scarce results. “Speed optimization is not part of customer service” they claim. But the reality is that this theme is badly developed and they don’t wanna admit it.
I would like to go back to the time I bought it and change my purchase, now it’s very difficult to switch to another one.

After the last update I am experiencing worse results. With the newspaper theme you will never be able to pass the web core vitals. sad but true. I hired an developer to develope a completely new theme without this heavy code that is loaded with the newspaper theme..