Site still very slow, advice needed

[Agnes]

Great support on here so I’m hoping I can get some help.

I have upgraded the server to a VPS, installed WP Rocket, and have activated the plugin’s month view caching, as well as added that JSON related snippet. Everything is up-to-date.

However, the site is sooooo slooooow, like 15-20 seconds to load the homepage, even longer for the calendar. This has been a constant nuisance since the beginning, but tonight I just got a message from a user is wanted to know if the site was always as slow as it is, do we have a problem she asked.

Since we are a calendar-based site, the calendar is the focus point, we have month view as default 3 events showing per day. But why would the homepage be so slow as well?

WP Rocket doesn’t work on the calendar page–they said that there’s a known conflict with the Events Calendar–so which caching plugins DO work? I have to disable it on the events page or else the page won’t load. I purchased WP Rocket on Modern Tribe’s recommendation.

Also, the backend is really slow too, could that indicate a problem with my hosting? I’ve already sent them a support ticket regarding the slowness as well.

Finally, we haven’t been deleting events that have passed, could this be an issue? We have at least a thousand that have already happened. Could those old events slow the site like this? Clearly, I’m not a super savvy WP/dev person.

We’re coming up to the end of our year with the Events Calendar and wondering whether it’s in our best interest to renew our licence. How can we get this thing working properly.

[Agnes]

I heard back from WP ROCKET, they said the following and told me to ask you about the following:

The options table almost 700MB, and it’s probably not normal, so it could be good to have a good look at it to understand why it’s so big.

A big options table can slow down a website a lot!

For your events page, there is an error which could explain why it’s showing as a blank page when WP Rocket is active on it

WordPress database error Unknown column ‘EventStartDate’ in ‘order clause’ for query SELECT wp_tym7cv_posts.ID FROM wp_tym7cv_posts WHERE 1=1 AND wp_tym7cv_posts.post_type = ‘tribe_events’ AND (wp_tym7cv_posts.post_status = ‘publish’ OR wp_tym7cv_posts.post_status = ‘tribe-ea-success’ OR wp_tym7cv_posts.post_status = ‘tribe-ea-failed’ OR wp_tym7cv_posts.post_status = ‘tribe-ea-schedule’ OR wp_tym7cv_posts.post_status = ‘tribe-ea-pending’ OR wp_tym7cv_posts.post_status = ‘tribe-ea-draft’ OR wp_tym7cv_posts.post_status = ‘private’) ORDER BY EventStartDate DESC, wp_tym7cv_posts.post_date DESC LIMIT 0, 1

HALP!

[Brook]

Howdy Agnes,

Performance is a huge passion of mine, I would love to help you with this.

I have upgraded the server to a VPS, installed WP Rocket, and have activated the plugin’s month view caching, as well as added that JSON related snippet. Everything is up-to-date.

I am happy to hear you both enabled caching and found that snippet. This was a really good idea for your site.

However, the site is sooooo slooooow, like 15-20 seconds to load the homepage, even longer for the calendar. This has been a constant nuisance since the beginning, but tonight I just got a message from a user is wanted to know if the site was always as slow as it is, do we have a problem she asked.

After having a look at your home page I can start to see why it’s so slow. You are running a ton of widgets on your site displaying events. It looks beautiful, but each and everyone of them is going to have a performance impact.

You appear well read on the topic, so I won’t go into a lot of detail on things you probably already know. To put things simply, WordPress is phenomenally slow with date queries (postmeta ones). This is a symptom of WordPress being so flexible.

WordPress defaults to showing 1 set of 10 posts in main body, another set of 5 in the sidebar. Most servers are capable enough to handle this, plus a little extra. These same servers should have no trouble with a set of 10 events in the body, plus another 5 in the sidebar (in spite of the slow WordPress date queries). But when you start getting as many sets of you’ve got, you are demanding a lot from your server. You have:

• A slider up top that appears to be querying 4 events.
• An upcoming widget that shows 3.
• A recent post widget that shows 3.
• A beautiful featured event widget, that shows not only that event but three related ones (yet another “set”)
• Another featured event widget.
• A past events widgets, showing 5.
• Recent posts again, showing 5.
• Upcoming events again, showing 5.

This is going to be taxing on a server, there is no doubt about it.

Finally, we haven’t been deleting events that have passed, could this be an issue? We have at least a thousand that have already happened. Could those old events slow the site like this? Clearly, I’m not a super savvy WP/dev person.

The more posts you have in your database, whether they are blog posts or events, the slower your site will be. You asked if this is “an issue”. I would not call it an issue, but it does mean that over time you may need progressively need to upgrade your server to accomodate.

Old posts can be good for SEO, helping people find your website on search engines more frequently. So you might prefer to keep them.

Based on your post IDs, I am guessing you have close to 19 thousand posts. That’s quite a few. I’d wager that most WordPress websites have less than a thousand.

WP Rocket doesn’t work on the calendar page–they said that there’s a known conflict with the Events Calendar–so which caching plugins DO work? I have to disable it on the events page or else the page won’t load. I purchased WP Rocket on Modern Tribe’s recommendation.

Personally I have had good success with W3 Total Cache on its default settings. With both it and WP Rocket I would recommend you disable “minification”. But

Also, the backend is really slow too, could that indicate a problem with my hosting? I’ve already sent them a support ticket regarding the slowness as well.

 

It very possibly could. Are all pages in the backend slow? How many posts have you setup to view in the backend? You can see this by clicking Screen Options in the upper right. It defaults to 20.

Now that we have a better understanding of why your site might be slow (a lot of posts + widgets is demanding) let’s consider some solutions.

1. You might need to upgrade your VPS. Who is providing your VPS, which plan are you on? If you can link to it, that will help me get a better idea of what is powering this site.
2. Trying to shrink your options table could certainly help. It’s wise to try, but there is a distinct possibility it won’t help much. I’m going to guess the majority of the space in that table is taken up by transients. If I were you I would install this plugin and run it’s “Clean Now” option. Once that has completed, I would deactivate the plugin and optionally uninstall it. Now double check the size of your options tables, what is it down to?

Please let me know if you have any followup questions. If you can answer some of the ones I have asked above, I can give you better recommendations from there.

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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