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Hi Team,
I have made the lots of research and DONE lots of changes into my live site regarding improvements of sites speed. But, I didn’t get any improvement regarding sites speed optimizations.
Finally, I have deactivated the Event Tickets Plus plugin and my site loading quicker about 95% fast. Before the deactivate the plugin my site is loading 15 to 16 seconds as a blank page after the page will display the content so total time is page load is 30 to 40 seconds. And after the deactivate the plugin site is loading 5 to 10 seconds.
I have got the suggestion that Event Ticket Plus taking too much time in query that’s why page is taking too much time.
Can you please help me to resolve this issue ASAP?
I hope you can come up with the proper solutions.
Thanks,
Howdy Xross,
I would love to help you with this. Performance is a passion of mine.
The fun thing about performance issues is that each persons is often unique. The server might be struggling with the amount of queries, the length of a certain one, how many recurring events there, or one of a million possibilities. The first step is to narrow it down.
Would you mind installing the plugin Query Monitor? Now visit one of the pages that was loading slow. When you click on the Queries dropdown, then the Queries submenu, what does it show? Could you share with me the top 5 slowest queries?
Cheers!
– Brook
Howdy Xross,
Thank you for sharing that detailed info. It was quite informative. Actually I was able to find one query that is running particularly slow on your server and could be optimized on our side. We have ticket that for our next big release: 4.2 . If we can squeeze it in we are going to.
But, that only accounts for .63 seconds of your page load. There are some truly alarming things in the query monitor breakdown. Database query time takes up 4 seconds. But that actually makes sense because it is running: 2300 Select queries. Normal is 100-200. Comparing the queries to your website I am starting to see at least some of the reasons why things are running so slow with Event Tickets Plus active.
The biggest thing that stands out is that you are displaying the attendance count for each event on the list page. This is a very intensive thing to do. Technical reason why: Due to the fact that WooCommerce orders are often updated by other plugins we recount them each time you display the ticket count. The more orders you have in your Woo history the longer it takes. Especially when you have a lot of pending or otherwise uncompleted orders. Normally not a problem when viewing tickets for only 1 event. But in this case due to your theme’s setup you are viewing 10 events at once, so it is taking very roughly 10 times as long to load as the usual single events page. No bueno. Obviously this could be fixed by not displaying the ticket count, but that’s not a great solution either since you clearly want to display that.
My suggestion would be to try caching. I don’t often recommend W3 Total Cache as it’s far from perfect. But in this case I think you should try installing it. I would disable its script / CSS minification, as that is one of W3’s weak points. In order to properly test whether this plugin is helping you will want to be logged out, or logged in as a regular user/subscriber. Admins will typically see much slower load times than these users due to all the unique stuff WP shows admins that can’t be cached. But if you setup and test logged out you will likely see an enormous improvement.
You could also try a more powerful server. It looks like your server is not underpowered by any means. But you have at least 20k posts and with how you have setup your theme your site is the opposite of performant. It will require a very heavy lifting server to always load these pages fast. But before we jump on to some alternative like this: Does configuring W3 Total Cache provide some significant gains? If not, how did you set it up. It does take a fair bit of reading in their tutorials to get setup properly so I’ll be interested to hear the settings you chose to see if I can identify anything worth adjusting.
Cheers!
– Brook
Oh awesome, WP Engine is a great host. WPEngine does have some caching stuff that is helping your page load as quick as it is. If you were on a cheap host running these customizations without any caching it would be loading much slower. The CDN is not really helping you here, but it’s not hurting either. Even still, neither of these is a replacement for full page caching or especially “fragment caching” as W3TC calls it. They are alternatives that in this case are going to be considerably less effective. That said, I know WP Engine bans W3TC so that’s not an option for you on your current server.
I have taken a goodly bit of time analyzing the data you shared. I spent 6 times what we normally allocate for support threads, and I did that because we take performance very seriously. Typically any time you make a tool more powerful it runs slower. WordPress has created an extremely powerful set of tools for plugins like ours with their Custom Post Types, but as a result these tools are incredibly slow. So we have spent countless hours, including literally half of 2014, focused on making our plugin run as fast as possible atop the WordPress platform. Thus it is rare that we find new areas we can actually optimize things.
To clarify there was really only one thing we could improve on our end in performance, and indeed that looks like it will be ready for the next release. You can see the code changes (pull request) here. If you implement this code on your site you should see a performance gain of about half of a second.
Your server seems to be dying the death of a thousand cuts rather than one big thing. The above was by far the biggest single thing, and event it only accounted for ~half a second. As I mentioned your events page has 2300 queries in it! Normal for the events page is about 1/20th of that. And while the query logs you shared only show 500 of those 2300, the main thing that was causing the queries I saw is the attendance counts.
I would recommend a tiered approach to trying to fix this:
- With the current server/customizations optimize everything you can. See how fast you can get it.
- If that is still not fast enough then one of the following is going to be necessary:
- Disable the less performant customizations so that you can get back to stock The Events Calendar speeds.
- Or, switch to a faster server. You could stick with WP Engine, but from what I understand of their infrastructure only their Premium tier is actually a faster server. You might be interested in a fast VPS or dedicated server from a more affordable host.
So let’s start with the first tier. I have already mentioned most of the things you could try but lets recap and complete the list:
- Review your Woo Orders, particularly those that are pending or on hold. Trash or complete as many of these as you can. The fewer uncomplete ones there are the faster each of those Attendance count queries will be.
- Empty your trash wherever you can. This goes for Woo Orders, Events, Posts, Comments, etc. This can help shrink the size of your database and thus make it faster.
- You should copy the code I just shared that will speed up your page load by about half of a second.
Now measure your page load again. Is it fast enough? If not, lets confirm what the query logs are showing (that it is the customizations, not the base platform that is slowing you down). On your staging server try switching to the Twenty Fifteen theme. Likely this will dramatically speed up the /events/ page. If you get to this step do you mind checking in Query Monitor how much faster it’s loading, and let me know? If it’s still not fast enough try disabling all plugins except the the The Events Calendar ones and WooCommerce itself. How much faster now? At this point you should have an extremely fast loading site, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s about 10x faster than the current. How fast is it? You might even try disabling the Filter Bar temporarily – it is one of the most powerful parts of our plugin and thus also the slowest. Now you will have an idea of the performance penalty imposed by the customizations, third parties, and even the Filerbar. Thus you can make an informed decision on what to do next.
Cheers!
– Brook
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