Hello!
We’ve purchased Newspaper 4 theme, but there is a small hiccup. After a year of operation site has become unbearably slow on relatively powerful hardware and with relatively modest load (70 concurrent users).
We have accumulated about 5 thousand articles most of which are in a single category, though we are using tags (which causes another funny side effect – thousands of cache update operations through terms_cache almost on each request).
Nevertheless, I have to give you a baseline. We’ve changed hardware over time in search of performance, so to be totally syre, we set up an empty virtual box (4GB TAM, 2 core CPU, 60GB SSD on DigitalOcean), simple LAMP server, a copy of our site and even then we were unable to get pageloads under a second (though all other plugins were enabled).
Next move was obvious and as follows (ensuring nothing beyond content, Newspaper theme and Visual Composer is present within installation):
a) Set up a new WordPress instance.
b) Populate content from production site (use wp-cli to update all links).
c) Add default Newspaper 4 theme and its default child theme, select latter as site theme.
d) Install visual composer (as recommended by theme).
d) Enable everything and set a few things up, so menus and category pages are as in production.
As a result all pages are being generated in approx. 1 second (1.09±0.13s; out of 100 measurements; page generation time), which is obviously not good enough, since under even moderate load and because of other plugins which are essential to site this time tends to grow.
What are your recommendations to gain significant performance improvements? Of course, enabling w3 total cache solves this problem for unauthenticated users, but we heavily rely on authenticated ones, so an advice would help.
Some suggestions
a) don’t use child theme, as it’s a redirect
b) ensure you have caching running on server like opcache, etc.
c) be sure to use normal WP optimizations (as per my own optimization sticky) — enough memory allocated to php, and upgrade default RAM for WP in wp-config.php -etc.
d) limit queries on post pages — meaning, avoid “most popular 7 days” kinds of things, try one query of “latest 5 stories” vs having three sidebar queries of 3 latest posts from 3 categories; try not using mega-menu to query dbase for story elements .. limit queries in footer
e) remove CSS over-rides in theme panel, move to style.css
f) consider using things like mod_pagespeed and or mod_SPDY if you serve all pages via https
g) turn off image thumbnail sizes you don’t actually use; plan layouts to limit total number of sizes for thumbs to no more than 5 or 3 if really going for speed
h) check server response time — which has nothing to do with theme and needs server to be optimized (our pages respond in 0.31 secs on avg., regardless of theme with only minor optimizations)
And of course look at some of the theme docs for suggestions from TagDiv on speed/performance.
Food for thought 🙂
Thanks, Chris. I’ll do that all and will report back.
a) Didn’t think of that, though theme has some light modifications.
b) We have.
c) That’s already have been done.
d) Optimizations have been done, though not all. I’ll look into that list once again. Memory limit is 256MB already – i can rise that, of course, but should I? Never received out-of-memory related errors.
e) Will do.
f) Already in use
g) Nice one, will do.
h) Response times when default themee (theme twenty fifteen) is set, are consistent 0.2+-0.05.
Thanks for feedback, and I will look into directions you gave in more detail.
