Very slow Wordpress site

March 30, 2016 5:16 PM

My travel blog is loading very slowly, especially the photo galleries. I'm using Wordpress, Nextgen Gallery, and Foobox. I'm into photography, so I want to have lots of high quality images (Retina, when possible). But I don't know how to optimize them to load reasonably fast. Or it could be something else causing the slow load times. I really don't know.

I am not so much asking for help with the website (although you are welcome to offer advice!) as asking where to go for such advice. I am not familiar with how to get (preferably free, though I might pay a bit) advice on what I need to change. Nextgen and Foobox say that speed optimization isn't their problem or "part of their support service".

A gallery page on my site

posted by mkuhnell to Computers & Internet (22 answers total)

It loads *very* quickly for me. The thumbnail pages load in maybe around 1s? 2s at most. I think maybe there may be some problem with where/how you're viewing the pages.
posted by RustyBrooks at 5:23 PM on March 30, 2016

Best answer: Hey, so, btw I timed it using Chrome's dev tools. You can try the same, it may help identify the culprit.

Here's a rough guide. On windows you can bring it up with control-shift-i. Otherwise use the "hamburger menu" on the top right, go to "More Tools" in the menu, then choose "Developer Tools". This will create a panel in the bottom of your browser window, with a dizzying variety of tools. It's a great help to developers.

Anyway, click on the word "Network" near the top of the panel, then choose "All" a bit below that. Load whichever page you want to check. It will tick off all the stuff it loads, showing when it started/stopped loading. I'll attach a screen shot of what I see here in a moment.
posted by RustyBrooks at 5:27 PM on March 30, 2016

Ach, it's not cooperating on the screen capture. Anyway it took a total of 2.8s to load *everything* which seems adequate.
posted by RustyBrooks at 5:33 PM on March 30, 2016

I use the Wordpress plugin EWWW Image Optimizer to help keep image load low. If you've applied little to no optimization, it will probably work wonders. (Although the site does not feel particularly slow to me either, and I'm on a rubbish connection.)
posted by quinndexter at 5:49 PM on March 30, 2016

It's possible that you get slow performance when you are logged in as an admin because it's skipping the caching it does to speed things up. How does it feel if you use a direct browser that's not logged in, or using private browsing/incognito?
posted by advicepig at 5:51 PM on March 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: @RustyBrooks 2.8 sec? Wow. I'm getting around 30 sec. Something must be really wrong on my end. Thanks for pointing me toward Chrome's dev tools (I usually use Safari, but these look great!).

Since you are all getting decent load times, it may mostly be an issue with my internet speed (which is in Southeast Asia and therefore not great, but it works for streaming, so I thought it was fast enough to judge by).

I installed WP Super Cache and that is helping, even for me. I'll check out image optimization (though I'm not clear on how much quality is lost with those).

Have any of you clicked on an image and brought up the lightbox? That's taking up to a minute for me to load the first image.

Thank you all! I love Mefi!
posted by mkuhnell at 6:09 PM on March 30, 2016

The full size images come up very fast. I picked a random one and it opened in 0.8s. Is that what you mean by "lightbox"? It's not bringing up any specific viewer or anything, just the image.
posted by RustyBrooks at 6:11 PM on March 30, 2016

It all seems perfectly normal. I ran through a couple of light boxed images too. I'm using an iPad on a 12Mb connection in Minnesota in the United States.
posted by advicepig at 6:13 PM on March 30, 2016

Your site seems about average speed to me, maybe 3 seconds? Clicking an image brings it up quickly but not instantaneously.

I think in this case it's probably your connection or something, but Wordpress can be really slow. If you search for 'wordpress speedup' on google there are a bunch of

I like to use Pingdom to see why my sites are slow.
posted by gregr at 6:13 PM on March 30, 2016

Response by poster: It should be using Foobox to bring up the image with a greyed background that can be swiped (or clicked) to the next image).
posted by mkuhnell at 6:14 PM on March 30, 2016

Best answer: Oh, hmm. Adblock is blocking some of your css and maybe some javascript. If I reload the page with ABP turned off then when I click on stuff it comes up in lightbox. It still comes up pretty fast though. I tried some pages I hadn't been to and it was all still a few seconds per page. Looks fine on my end.
posted by RustyBrooks at 6:38 PM on March 30, 2016

I did notice the lightbox slowdown you mentioned. It looks like FooBox is trying to preload the previous and next images, but it's triggering the load of the two extra images at the same time the first image is starting to load, so it takes 3x as long to see the image. Maybe try disabling FooBox preload?
posted by pocams at 7:09 PM on March 30, 2016

Response by poster: @pocams. Thanks, I'll try that. How can you see what foobox is loading?
posted by mkuhnell at 8:14 PM on March 30, 2016

I don't know if this is necessarily the problem, but it looks like most of your JPEGs are in the 1.2 MB range, which could take some time to download on a slower DSL connection (and would be absolutely painful on dialup, if that's a concern). JPEGs that are around 1600x1200px in size like yours absolutely do not need to be this large to still be very high quality. Just resaving the JPEG in Paint.net at its default quality setting of 95 resulted in a file that was half as large, and a quality setting of 80 got it down to 1/4th as large, and I could detect no immediately discernible difference in quality between them and the original. On Photoshop, using the High Quality preset got it down to 1/3 of the size. So yes, doing a bit of work to optimize the images would likely help a lot (not to mention save on bandwidth if that's a concern with your hosting provider).
posted by Aleyn at 10:34 PM on March 30, 2016 [2 favorites]

Best answer: As a datapoint, your site came up very quickly for me, both thumbnail page and lightbox images. As a WordPress focused developer, I wouldn't spend more time trying to tune your site. It's definitely something on your end.
posted by humboldt32 at 1:27 AM on March 31, 2016

Snappy for me, and WebPageTest mostly likes it. There's clearly something up at your end, but I'd be a bit concerned with how the lightbox code trips up the most common ad blockers, because that's going to be a slice of users who don't get to click/swipe between images.
posted by holgate at 3:51 AM on March 31, 2016

Response by poster: Clearly something is wrong with Foobox. I'll make that my first priority.

I'll also look at using smaller file sizes. Though I'm not going to replace the 100s of images that are already there, it might help in the future. I need to look into how to do this while maintaining good image quality. In Lightroom, I'm currently exporting as JPG at 75% quality.
posted by mkuhnell at 5:35 AM on March 31, 2016

I really don't think you need to make the jpegs smaller, necessarily. I think they're adequately sized. The adblocking will be a problem though. Your lightbox thing degrades relatively benignly (the images still show, just without next/prev etc) but definitely not ideal.
posted by RustyBrooks at 7:06 AM on March 31, 2016

Best answer: Doing a server neighbor lookup on your domain is getting me hundreds of results. Are you on a cheap (~$5-$8) per month "Unlimited" hosting plan? Seeing this many domains come back seems to say so. Unlimited shared hosting plans are usually the worse a host has to offer where they jam as many sites onto each box as possible to maximize their profits. If all those websites are jammed onto one box and sharing resources, any one can misbehave and slow your site down.

I'd consider shopping around for a new host or upgrading your plan if you are on anything that promises "Unlimited space."
posted by kpraslowicz at 7:20 AM on March 31, 2016 [1 favorite]

Honestly, you don't need to do anything to the site.
posted by humboldt32 at 11:52 AM on March 31, 2016

Ah, good info from kpraslowicz. That's a lot of neighbors, so performance should be expected to fluctuate. I recommend WebFaction hosting.
posted by humboldt32 at 11:56 AM on March 31, 2016

Response by poster: No, I don't have unlimited space and am paying a reasonable amount. But thank you! That really suggests that I shop around for a better host :-(
posted by mkuhnell at 6:46 PM on March 31, 2016 [1 favorite]