Remember when updating to DELETE old theme and TD plugins, and upload NEW theme and plugins; including NEW child theme if you use one!

Try using my sticky upgrade guide or you may be sorry.

It’s a new version of theme; you may need to redo your home page for some modules, and reset sidebars.

It’s an UPGRADE not an update.

😉

I sometimes answer sardonically ahead of the official answer, which might be the same but worded differently (as was this case!).

Sadly there is no ‘one way’ to optimize anything with WordPress — as the theme itself needs a little tweaking as with ALL themes (seriously, want to hear about my fun with Canvas or MyThemeShop, ThemeFuse, etc.?).

Most of MY particular tweaks have to do with “baseline” things needed for ANY website/wordpress install -regardless of theme (I am working on an ebook on this topic in my hahahahahah spare time… no really…. someday….).

Theme tweaks are really just setting up site how you want it; and then more recently the pesky Visual Composer stuff (hence the shim of doom, er … solution).

Technically theme doesn’t need any special optimization vs any other site of comparable complexity, but your mileage may vary as I am wont to say.

I will post the cheat sheet on how to load Google Fonts more better good too one of these blue moons. The old method for Newspaper 2 I posted a bazillion years ago sure won’t work now !

Peace and happy trails.

You should have a 301 redirect from any “alt name” URLS to your main URL.

So if main site is

mysite.abcd

and you have alt

like

mysiteisneat.abcd

then the second one should point at first with 301 redirect; both should not “resolve” … in other words only ONE version should show up on web if somebody types in the URL. Same with www vs non www, http vs non https, etc.

There should only be ONE version of your site that ‘resolves’ on the web; this will avoid all canonical and duplicate content issues!

🙂

Cool.
Going back to hide under rock.

Chris out!

That would be awesome!!! 🙂

You mean my one sticky thread at top of the forum?
Good place to start perhaps.

Some traffic not caught due to anonymous browsing; some things not tracked due to duplicate visitors vs unique visits; some duplication from same IPs (e.g., AOL, cable company) may not be counted twice even though two visitors (some systems look for some other data, some just count two people using same IP as same person, not unique).

Google never gets all visits as javascript doesn’t work all browsers, alt image pixel may be blocked by adblocker software, etc.

AdSense may combine all ads served (2 ads per page 10,000 visits = 20,000 impressions) dpending on what you look at.

We have found using something like PIWIK (open source) running on server is middle ground. if you have dedicated server, worth looking at 🙂

Or, go by AWSTATS which is counting content actually SERVED by the hardware/software and will be more accurate. If your website serves 10,000 pages – then that is how many pages got served. Period.

Did you check the support forum for the plugin, such as the issue with Yoast SEO plugin?

https://wordpress.org/support/topic/plugin-conflict-83?replies=4

Also using the console in chrome you’re getting what looks like minification error with .js and/or missing jquery reference.

Did you try turning off ALL your plugins except visual composer and the ‘retina’ plugin?

Yup. Just take all of that out of your style.css file which is what I do.

All those features you keep asking for need to have the code someplace. And better to have one big file, vs. having 10 different CSS files like some sites. That’s the whole idea behind “combining CSS” so only one file gets loaded/cached.

CSS larger for this theme vs hot topix (I use that also), is all those fancy visual composer modules and layouts; which is why you have 50 layout options vs the 3 or 3 with topix — apples to oranges. Why does a V8 engine use more gas has than a 4-cylinder ? Self explanatory – twice the cylinders.

No way for theme to easily generate different CSS and a nightmare for support (where is my WooCommerce CSS? Un, did you activate that option? Where is the option? In the CSS panel. Where is the CSS panel? Did you see the documentation? What is that?) etc. 😉

Just my two cents if we’re all going to chime in on this topic.

Upshot: tweak your site to remove those elements you don’t use, for best performance.

I did have conversation with Radu about what could safely be removed from the config file, also, such as require loading modules for bbpress if not using that. Never got to finishing that process due to the server CPU issues we had due to stupid VC memory leaks or whatever is up with that.

Personally I would prefer to have a MAGAZINE focused theme without all the bbpress, multisite and woocommerce stuff – but 20-30% of people buying this are “wanting” and perhaps “demanding” those features so they are in there (the Magazine theme got bloated from Oct 2013 to Jan 2015 due to this … annoying to me, personally — but this is a “one for all” theme, not a micro niche focused offering; or it would not sell in these competitive themeforest marketplace).

Happy Sunday. Ranting over (rant!!!!)… 🙂

• This reply was modified 11 years by simchris.

You would need to insert that into the template file for the module/layout for post page you happen to be using for your site. Look at the files in the root of the theme folder.

eg., if using single template 5 … well, guess which files that would be ? 😉

single_template_5.php
loop-single-5.php

so, if you look at loop-single.5 you might see this

<div class="td-post-text-content">
<?php echo $td_mod_single->get_content();?>
</div>

<footer>
<?php echo $td_mod_single->get_post_pagination();?>
<?php echo $td_mod_single->get_review();?>
<?php echo $td_mod_single->get_source_and_via();?>
<?php echo $td_mod_single->get_social_sharing();?>
<?php echo $td_mod_single->get_social_like_tweet();?>
<?php echo $td_mod_single->get_next_prev_posts();?>
<?php echo $td_mod_single->get_author_box();?>

And so you might insert your code either in footer area above the post pagination, replace the social sharing element; or after author box … etc.

Often you can test by simply putting some text into a spot in above file, like

<p>Happy Sunday Everybody - this is a test.</p>

and see where that prints on your post page.

Hope that helped 🙂

I find the normal “regenerate thumbnails” works better than “force regen” plugin.

Try upping the memory allocated to WP in your wp-config.php file which MUST be done *in addition* to the php.ini/php memory setting for hosting account.

Newsmag is a ‘bordered’ site — it uses lines to show separation of different content areas; as clearly shown in site demo. Of course, you can hide the borders if you want to. Newspaper is more ‘open’ and ‘wider.’

Speed test “zero” ? Impossible unless page didn’t load. You would likely need to optimize your site, try following my sticky post and the theme docs.

This is different theme than Newsmag — so obviously not all the same options are available. However many of the cool features from Newsmag will be in “Newspaper 5” coming “really really soon now ….” (as free upgrade, per TagDiv folk).

Just food for thought; I do NOT work here 🙂

• This reply was modified 11 years by simchris.

Why would the theme have anything to do with URLs posted on Facebook ?

The theme has nothing to do with how URLs are parsed. Meaning, if the URL you share to FB is correct and actually works, and somebody clicks that link – it will work if the site is accessible.

That is handled by your DNS, web server, and the ISP being able to resolve the DNS pointing at the IP where your website is hosted.

It might be a setting you have for Android users, or it may be that the caching of your CSS is mismatched on server and some android users or chrome users where chrome caches websites, is loading old CSS and not the new CSS and page will not load properly.

In those cases you need to clear server cache quite completely, where applicable; and a visitor who has a browser which doesn’t reload the CSS properly would need to hit “refresh” in their mobile browser to get the new CSS.

Sometimes you can force this by setting a very short TTL just for the CSS, like one hour, and let it be that way for a week — bad for pagespeed, but can “force” some browsers to make sure they only see new site CSS.

Might not be your issues; just a thought 🙂

Talk to your hosting provider on how to optimize server; port connection, caching, hard disk speed, network speed, etc.

My average is 0.30 regardless of theme, http vs https, WordPress or static site.

Not theme related.

• This reply was modified 11 years by simchris.
• This reply was modified 11 years by simchris.

I personally haven’t found the need for retina versions — meaning, do you really want to have TWO versions of all your images AND all the thumbs ?

Fact is – most people looking at content on retina/HD are doing so on mobile devices (e.g., phone, iphone, iPad) and in effect if you have an image on your desktop version, when it appears on mobile the pixel density is still double … meaning if you show a responsive 640×480 image half size, technically the visible ‘density’ still appears “double” when viewed at 320×240 … all my desktop images look amazing on my retina iPhone 6 and iPad Air — no extra “retina” tomfoolery needed.

You may have a special need to do this, but for our sites it has been a non-issue.

If you’re trying to show retina images to UHD/retina desktop/TVs, where you want to show a 1280×960 image vs 640×480, then you’d need to find solution that does that just for the desktop viewport vs “all” viewports, where — as I’ve illustrated — it’s a bit redundant for mobile.

Not sure that helps in any way — just fully understand the hype around retina ready/compatible before wasting a lot of time on that. Content is still the most important element. 🙂

Also be aware sometimes no ad is served by adsense if their system times out.

In your adsense account you can specify a fallback image such as site logo with link to subscribe page or whatever, so that when no ad served you don’t have blank spot.

You can also review their recommendations for your site in AdSense to serve only the sizes and locations they “recommend” for your particular site to increase conversions and clicks for better revenue.

TIP:
it’s better to use the single domain name (.pt) and then do all your work there.
Then setup the .com version as a 301/302 redirect via your host panel, so that both domains work, but only “one” is the REAL domain — this removes duplicate content issues with Google; and since you have just ONE working domain in use with ONE install of WP, dbases, theme, everything would work normally.

@radu
hi … swamped with trying to update our business site and our new ecom system; have to ‘ignore’ my magazine sites for awhile … so I will be a bit of a ghost for a bit 🙂

You can change the file uploads folder by reading the documentation for WordPress .. of which there is much in their “codex” … some core things for WordPress can be editied in the wp-config.php file — the theme (again) does *not* control where images are uploaded.

See:
(note section on changing location of image directory)
https://codex.wordpress.org/Editing_wp-config.php#Moving_uploads_folder

default location
define( 'UPLOADS', 'blog/wp-content/uploads' );

change to something like /images
define( 'UPLOADS', 'blog/images' );

If you do *ANYTHING* else with images, like sub-sub folders, or other folders — this would generally ONLY be for images you want to drop into things like an ad widget or manually place into a post.

For example you could put your ads into /blog/ads/ and all your ad file graphics there, which are then used when placing manual ads.

If you want images to be assigned to a “featured” image — you need to
a) make sure images are in the uploads folder, whatever you call it
b) use a plugin to make WP see those images

Hope that provides further help.

I’ll be off support help for everybody here the next few weeks, so have a great month everybody!

-CS

Woohoo!! It’s a process/pain — but worth the effort, and looks like you’re making major progress! 🙂

• This reply was modified 11 years by simchris.

BTW …
simple solution
a) turn off all plugins except:

– VC, TagDiv, Yoast SEO, clear caching and turn OFF
– leave your google adsense stuff

b) TUNE YOUR SITE and check speed rating .. should be double or triple what you have now.

c) turn on caching; see how it impacts rating/performance. Tune that as needed.

d) turn on plugins one by one, and see how this impacts your speed rating. Anything which drops your score by more than one point should be avoided!

Hope that helped ! It’s a process, and takes some time. Expect to spend hours on this not minutes.

• This reply was modified 11 years by simchris.

If you use something like YOAST SEO, it can help you control the meta data for supplemental pages — which is what I do.

Yes…. I think you will need to do what we did:

a) use older version of Visual Composer — which the main thing is missing is the extra woocommerce modules, I think.

b) possibly use the SHIM plugin; where you would setup your home page with VC then turn VC off leaving the shim plugin active.

In theory, if you go back to a 4.3.5 version of VC the shim may not be needed. It’s really only needed with the 4.4x versions which added a ton of ‘code bloat’ and hence the CPU issues started to crop up. Likely you’re getting a 503 due to how they have your container setup; in our case having dedicated server, it didn’t kill the box entirely but it started to really slow down when CPU usage jumped by 50 times normal load (!) — might be 500 or 5000 times normal load, actually — dropping a zero someplace there.

Okay, direct from grand wizard Mr. Radu …. here is the code to hide the shim and VC on post pages for those of us who only use VC for home page or whatever and do NOT use it for posts! You don’t need to use *this* version unless you’re using the SHIM plugin to deal with CPU spikes with VC versions post 4.4 (for regular code for just hiding VC on posts, see the prior post ABOVE).

Here is updated from RADU June 5, 2015:
(and this goes in functions.php file in main root of theme folder, for those who did not already know that . . . )

function dequeue_visual_composer_css() {
if (is_single()) {
wp_dequeue_style('js_composer_front');
wp_dequeue_style('td-vc-composer-css-shim');
}
}
add_action('wp_enqueue_scripts', 'dequeue_visual_composer_css', 1003);

Hello from California 🙂

Thank you kind sir and grand wizard! 🙂

Basically youre going to have to carefully audit every plugin you use and see if better option.

I did a post someplace on how to not use google fonts… Dont have that handy.

I think you need to edit style.css to remove any google font then also comment out the sections in the theme includes functions file to not load any font from google.