Page load speed

[Joy]

See attached screenshot and report of a P3 Plugin Performance Profiler report on which plugins take what time to load… combined the ordinary and PRO versions take 2 seconds of a 3.6 seconds page load time or 55% of the total effect of 27 plugins! If you go to http://secretgarden.eu.com/events/ you will find there are a grand total of 3 events listed! Can you point me to how I can dramatically reduce the effect of this or I may need to uninstall and do some other solution for this

WordPress Plugin Profile Report
===========================================
Report date: April 29, 2016
Theme name: SecretGarden
Pages browsed: 16
Avg. load time: 4.6742 sec
Number of plugins: 27
Plugin impact: 76.95% of load time
Avg. plugin time: 3.5968 sec
Avg. core time: 0.6642 sec
Avg. theme time: 0.2238 sec
Avg. mem usage: 172.64 MB
Avg. ticks: 80,009
Avg. db queries : 125.00
Margin of error : 0.1893 sec

Plugin list:
===========================================
P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler) – 0.0048 sec – 0.13%
Akismet – 0.0144 sec – 0.40%
All In One Seo Pack – 0.0849 sec – 2.36%
bbP private groups – 0.0161 sec – 0.45%
bbPress Notify – 0.0031 sec – 0.09%
bbPress – 0.1662 sec – 4.62%
Contact Form 7 – 0.0393 sec – 1.09%
Duplicate Post – 0.0026 sec – 0.07%
The Events Calendar PRO – 1.4350 sec – 39.90%
Google Sitemap Generator – 0.0035 sec – 0.10%
WPBakery Visual Composer – 0.1622 sec – 4.51%
LeadPages connector – 0.0840 sec – 2.34%
Page-list – 0.0012 sec – 0.03%
Private content – 0.0005 sec – 0.01%
Redirection – 0.0399 sec – 1.11%
Seo Image – 0.0127 sec – 0.35%
Simple Share Buttons Plus – 0.0235 sec – 0.65%
The Events Calendar – 0.5141 sec – 14.29%
UberMenu 3 – The Ultimate WordPress Mega Menu – 0.2595 sec – 7.21%
Wangguard – 0.0190 sec – 0.53%
WooCommerce Membership – 0.0268 sec – 0.74%
Woocommerce Tm Extra Product Options – 0.2023 sec – 5.62%
WooCommerce – 0.4174 sec – 11.60%
WooThemes Helper – 0.0023 sec – 0.06%
WP SMTP – 0.0086 sec – 0.24%
Wp Super Cache – 0.0125 sec – 0.35%
Empty – 0.0404 sec – 1.12%

[Brook]

Howdy Joy,

I would love to help you with this. Performance is my favorite topic.

I spent some time perusing your site and measuring page load times. Here is what I found:

1. /events/ – 2.23s
2. /what-you-say/ – 9.44s
3. /blog/ – 1.81s
4. /shop/ – 1.66s
5. /events/ – 1.80s
6. /what-you-say/ – 3.76s
7. /events/ – 1.72s

As you can see the page load times will vary a fair bit, but the events page is not significantly slower than the rest, in fact it basically came in second.

I am assuming your p3 profile was for the /events/ page. In which case, it does make sense that the plugin which is serving a page would take up the majority of the time it takes to load the page. One of the things our plugin does is takeover the main WP Loop and content template. This will reduce the amount of time WordPress itself takes on those graphs by a lot, but simultaneously increase the amount of time The Events Calendar takes. The net time will still stay approximately the same, as noted above when viewing other pages and seeing load at similar, sometimes slower, times.

That said I see you are displaying the Events List widget twice on your pages. Each time you display it it will have do a get_posts() query, just like the main query on your page. This is a somewhat time consuming operation. If you have two list style widgets, event or otherwise, plus your main content, this portion of the page load will take approximately 3x longer than if you just showed the main content. You might be interested in removing one or more of those widgets if page speed is the most important thing to you.

Does that all make sense? Do you have any questions?

Cheers!

– Brook

[Joy]

Brook thankyou for your interesting answer which progresses this for me.

P3 just measures what it says is plugin load speed for all plugins, it is not in any way focussed on or run linked to a certain page, and in the past, for example it said Jetpack was v slow, I stopped using it and experienced faster load speeds so I trust it is saying something worthwhile. You are saying however that Events Calendar being more could to some extent be sinced WP laod is called Events load time. If so this is more acceptable of course.. I may test later by disabling and testing load speeds for pages.

My interest was mostly about general load speed and I thought ALL plugins affect all pages by needing code in the header so I was in no way comparing say the actual events page with What You say.

Interesting re ‘What You Say though’ … do you on that page see obvious things I can change in the background that would speed it up? (I know this is not your remit.. just asking since you said it interests you!)

Events List Widget Twice… do you mean in the Events Dropdown where there is a menu for Events & Courses and also one for Next Event?

I think you are saying to remove one of these so it would mean changing the functionality people get or am I missing something (I’m not a coder)

Lastly in general any page speed / website insights from what you’ve seen would be gratefully received

Many thanks, Tim

[Brook]

Howdy Tim,

Thanks for lending a listening ear. I well know graphs like that can look damning at first glance. The first time I saw one a couple years back it inspired me to really investigate what was going on.

Events List Widget Twice… do you mean in the Events Dropdown where there is a menu for Events & Courses and also one for Next Event?

Exactly. As you suspected I was recommending removing one or both of these to speed up page loads a little bit.

P3 just measures what it says is plugin load speed for all plugins, it is not in any way focussed on or run linked to a certain page, and in the past, for example it said Jetpack was v slow, I stopped using it and experienced faster load speeds so I trust it is saying something worthwhile.

Thanks for the reminder here. It has been a while since I used P3. Anymore I prefer the more granular ones like Query Monitor (which include more detail for devs), so it has been a while since I’ve fired up P3.

Further something I remembered is that the P3 profiler will sometimes include more event pages in its test than other ones. If you want to do a fair test of The Events Calendar versus the other ones I would disable both widgets temporarily, then do a manual scan with the profiler. Try visiting each page in your main menu. It is quite likely you will see a more even breakdown of the plugins actual performance in there. To be up front the calendar might still be a teeny bit high.

If you are interested in the technical specifics: we are caught between a rock and a hard place when it comes to doing things the “WordPress way” – as people often say. The WordPress way is to store everything, even dates, as post_meta values. This makes your plugin broadly compatible in the WordPress ecosystem, with other plugins like Gravity Forms being able to handle our dates natively. But it also makes things insanely slow. Since dates are not stored as dates, but rather as post_meta (longtext) it makes every query to them many times more expensive. We have often considered creating our own tables within the database so that dates can be dates and things can be speedy, but such a notion is highly controversial and many folks complain when other plugins have done similar stuff. So every time we talk about this easy and major performance enhancement we circle around this discussion. So far we have decided that instead lets do everything else we can to make the plugin fast, which includes regular performance audits of every other area. Worth mentioning I do not know of any WP Calendar plugin that has not made similar choices and thus they all run kinda slow in my tests. Sometimes the WordPress way is not the performant way.

Interesting re ‘What You Say though’ … do you on that page see obvious things I can change in the background that would speed it up? (I know this is not your remit.. just asking since you said it interests you!)

I was surprised by this as well. I was wondering if maybe it relates to the youtube videos. Depending upon how they’re embedded the server might be querying YouTube itself, waiting for YouTube to respond, and then finally serving them. I don’t know, just a guess based on the fact that at a glance I did not notice the embeds on other pages.

Please do let me know if you have any more questions or concerns. Thanks Tim!

• Brook

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