Loading is prohibitively slow

[Agnes]

I realize that this has been a topic many times on here, but I still haven’t been able to figure out how to increase loading times, which I’m afraid may be hurting my ranking.

Our whole site is based on the calendar, we are a listing site for local music. But the calendar, which we have in full month view in order to showcase the sheer amount of events we have posted, takes soooooooo long to load. I’ve read your caching article which is a great resource, but the recommended plugins all seem to conflict (ie: disable) the filter bar add on, which is crucial since we have so much content. There were some more advanced database/server(?) caching methods listed, but I’m not so clear on what exactly to do to implement them.

Could you recommend a caching plugin/technique that would not interfere with your filter bar and/or point me in the direction of some clear instructions on how to help our calendar page load more quickly?

[Brook]

Howdy Agnes,

Please pardon my belated response. I typed up a response the day you sent this but it’s obviously not here. I must have closed the window too quickly after hitting send. 🙁 My apologies. But I would love to help you with this. Performance is a huge passion of mine.

The best caching solution is our built in one. Have you already enabled the Month View Cache in WP-Admin > Events > Settings > Display ? If so have you tried disabling JSON LD for the month view page? That should help the main calendar page load faster. This can be done by inserting the following snippet into your site, perhaps your theme’s functions.php file:

https://gist.github.com/elimn/<wbr />9ce1c3e64d060b758e22627b815455<wbr />ae

That might drastically speed up your site on its own.

Regarding your question on a recommended caching technique, I wish I could give you a simple answer. But caching is not simple. It’s often a specialty of select server admins, with 5-30 years of experience administrating servers. I can give you very generic recommendations like our article does. But to get own to the nitty gritty you need someone experienced to analyze your server, find the bottle necks, and then help you make changes. This can often be expensive, and is usually only done for large websites with hundreds of thousands of visitors. Until you’re that size it often makes sense to just upgrade your server to something faster. Where are you situated right now? Do they offer more resources or a higher plan? Often times your website host is willing to help you find out what in your server is bottlenecking you, and help you find a more expensive plan that should alleviate this.

Does that all make sense? Did out built in cache combine with disabling JSON do what you needed?

Cheers!

– Brook

[Agnes]

Hi Brook,

Thank you so much for your reply! I have enabled the built-in caching, but have not disabled JSON LD. The link for the script you’re suggesting isn’t working though!

If that doesn’t speed it up sufficiently, I’ll look into server solutions. Thanks!

[Brook]

Oops, sometimes WordPress just randomly inserts HTML into our forum comments here, like it did with that script I shared. Here is the proper link to that script for disabling JSON LD:

https://gist.github.com/elimn/9ce1c3e64d060b758e22627b815455ae

On current versions of the plugins that can yield some huge performance gains with caching enabled. That is because JSON LD does not get cached. In future versions we’d like to cache it as well. But until then disabling it is a good idea if you’re pushing your server to the brink.

Did that help?

Cheers!

– Brook

[Craig]

I’ve spent about a week trying to figure out this issue of the month view. I just added this snippet and it appears to be working. Page speed timings were going through the roof for about the past 3 weeks, but the loading is *relatively* quick now.

It might be a good idea to simply add this into the main functionality of the month view calendar, as I’m sure this issue is a big one for many of your customers.

Thanks,
Craig

[Craig]

This article talks about why this is happening. Huge performance hits when JSON LD – up to 250x longer to process. Yikes. JSON LD problems

[Brook]

Howdy Craig,

Thank you for letting me know it is running faster now!

Fortunately there is nothing inherently slow about JSON LD. However, storing events in the WordPress format then trying to read hundreds of them is inherently slow. We built month view Caching to eliminate that slowness as often as possible. The problem is that we added JSON LD recently, and did not add a separate cache for it. So we effectively undid all the speed boost that month view cache provided. In the future we will start caching JSON LD as well, making the cache highly effective again. Until then for folks with performance problems we are advising they run the snippet as you did. The snippet is not a perfect solution but it works really well for now.

Please let me know if you need anything else. Cheers!

– Brook

[Support Droid]

Hey there! This thread has been pretty quiet for the last three weeks, so we’re going to go ahead and close it to avoid confusion with other topics. If you’re still looking for help with this, please do open a new thread, reference this one and we’d be more than happy to continue the conversation over there.

Thanks so much!
The Events Calendar Support Team

[Author]

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