Slow loading performance when saving to website?

#1

Hi,

We are trying to track down and issue that appears to be related to the Comet Cache plugin. Most of the time the plugin helps to speed up the website, but often it crawls in loading pages (upwards of 10 seconds). We think this is related to any new revisions that are made in our website, but can not be sure. Please, can you look at our website and assist?! (Comet cache reporting code is turned on.)

www.iaia.edu

#2

@iaiawebmaster: It looks to me from looking at the Comet Cache notes that the issue you describe occurs when a page is first cached. That happens when a post or page is visited for the first time after the cache has been cleared. Once the cached version of the post or page has been generated, then everything flies along.

There are several things you can do to improve this situation.

The first thing I’d recommend is that you turn on the Auto-Cache Engine. This will mean that posts and pages will be cached “in the background” without waiting for someone to click on them. So when someone does go to them, the post/page is already cached and loads fast.

To make the Auto-Cache Engine work, you will need two things:

  1. To use a plugin that provides a sitemap. I see you are using Yoast SEO; I suspect that that might provide such a sitemap. If not, you might try adding the Simple Sitemap plugin, or (my preference) just switching over to The SEO Framework.
  2. Either regular visitors to your site to trigger WordPress’s rather lame version of a cronjob (where a visit to one post/page will trigger the caching of multiple posts/pages) or a real cronjob (which you would set up via cPanel) which runs every x minutes irrespective of visitor numbers and which has the same effect.

The next thing to tackle are your HTML Compression settings in Comet Cache. What I’d suggest here is that you turn off all the settings offering to combine things, so that you use only the settings that compress. This should reduce the amount of work that the compressor has to do when a post/page is first cached.

Thirdly, I strongly suggest using a CDN. You will hear some people say that using a CDN will make your site go faster. That’s not quite true: it depends where you are and how you access the site. But a CDN will (a) usually make the experience much more consistent, and (b) provide significant benefits when coupled with the changed HTML Compressor settings. That’s because a good CDN will use http/2, where you will see significant benefits in using a larger number of small files rather than a smaller number of large files. (If your server had http/2 enabled, this might not be so important, but my browser says that you don’t.)

3 Likes
#3

Apologies for the looong delay in responding to this. It took a while to figure out the best way to apply your suggestions. Thanks to Comet Cache, our website is zippy now (https://iaia.edu). I disabled the Auto-Cache engine in WordPress and added your mu-plugin via CPanel to the backend to stop random caching scenarios. This of course has greatly increased our website performance and now I only clear the cache on the weekends during website off-hours. I also use WP Control to run the clear and auto-cache functions.

As for the sitemap, it is now showing up and was not because of an issue with Yoast SEO. CDN will happen on our website at a later time.

Thanks again, Jason