Slow Loading Times

[Ian StJohn]

The sites that I use this theme on are all displaying very slow loading times indicative of the theme coding. Would you be so kind as to explore what can be done to improve the loading times?

Ian

[Sonnal S Sinha]

Hi Ian,

Well we are using WordPress handbook and codex methods to get the codes very tight as per rules. So i guess here are the factors which cause slow website:
1. Hosting is shared and isn’t good one. Better hosts are siteground, bluehost/hostgator/hostmonster, asmallorange.

2. Cache plugin isn’t present in your site which causes site to slow. If you aren’t good with settings would suggest to use WP Fastest Cache. If you are a PRO then use W3 Total Cache which is really good with all settings. Avoid Minify CSS and JS in both cache plugins.

3. Lastly use of images. Images which are high res and bulky cause most of the load times. Use low res web safe images which are in kbs and don’t cause much load time.

4. Use of lazy load plugins: Lazy load of images causes the upper part of site to load and then when user scrolls down then that section loads causing your visitor experience smoother.

If doing all this still doesn’t solve use cloudflare.com on your website and that should make it a faster experience for your site.

Regards,
Shri

[Ian StJohn]

Thank you will use your advice

Ian

[Bryan DeBusk]

The average load time of the demo theme is 24 seconds when we tested it on multiple platforms and internet providers. The fastest load was 16 seconds, but we couldn’t replicate that even with the same combination of device, browser, and provider. I’ve gone through the support section here and clicked on several of the sites where others are using this theme. One loaded in 12 seconds, and the rest were all 16 seconds or longer. Our host streamlined everything they can on settings as indicated above (plus some), and we still can’t get better than 16 seconds with the demo. Once we make any changes such as different images or additional content, it takes even longer. The host looked at the theme code and said it needs lots of work. They also said the images that come with the package need work (CSS Sprites would help with things like the social icons and other images).

We ran GTmetrix on the demo. It came back at 27 seconds load time, 2.27MB, and 100 requests. I ran it on another site on the same server with a different WP theme. Came back at 1.34 seconds, 774 KB, and 44 requests. I ran it again on some of the other SKT White sites from this support section. All come back with terrible load times and too many requests regardless of the amount of content (ranged from the 2.27MB in the demo to 34 MB).

Do you have any other solutions? Although I love this theme, I’m going to have to request a refund and find something else if we can’t get a decent load time.

Thanks,
Bryan

[Sonnal S Sinha]

Hi Bryan,

While i would agree with CSS sprites etc and other recommendations. I cannot agree with the fact of 24 seconds. Here we are sharing with you 2 reports one from gtmetrix and other from pingdom tools:

https://slack-files.com/T02T6CHHY-F04EZPSPS-49960438c9
https://slack-files.com/T02T6CHHY-F04EZPR30-0f49c5b708

It took around in both as you can see much lesser time than what you stated. Now what leads to more time (tools reach from top to the bottom trying to load the whole page)

But here what we have done is loading of the items only when you scroll over them. So whereas tools show more time to load, actual time to load the site is much lesser.

Yes we do agree there are 3-4 points still which need our attention. We will fix them up and then it should be a much faster theme to load.

Also the site of the default theme is current 4 mb. So we will reduce the size of the images to the least we can and also the social icons using css sprites and make the theme size 1.5 mb. So that it would become an A grade in both GT metrix, YSlow and also on Pingdom tools.

Give us 1 week’s time for this and we will surely come back to you with upgraded theme which will be much faster than it is now.

Regards,
Shri

[Bryan DeBusk]

Thanks, Shri. I appreciate your attention and help. We’ve done some additional checking today, and the slow load time seems to be isolated now to Firefox on mac and multiple versions of Safari on iPhone and iPad. Load time for the html on Chrome for mac is 350 ms, whereas on Firefox it is 19.4 seconds. We used several website testers and got similar results. iPhone comes in at 8-12 seconds.

Any idea where the problem could be or if/how we could address it?

Thanks!

Bryan

[Bryan DeBusk]

Finally found the problem!!

It only loads slowly if you are logged in as WP admin. There is no delay if I’m logged in as admin and use a different theme, and there’s no delay if I’m not logged in. So there’s no problem for most users.

The lag still exists for iOS users even without this issue. Hope we can get that corrected since most of our users will be mobile.

[Sonnal S Sinha]

Hi Bryan,

We modified and reduced the size of the theme to under 2.5mb and here is the result: http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/bYsK63/http://sktthemesdemo.net/skt-white-pro/

Given you re-access to the theme till 30th April. Kindly download the theme from here:
sktthemes.net/my-account (use forgot password in case you forgot)

Theme Instructions after download:

Kindly visit Appearance>Themes>Activate some other theme for the time being.

Then click on old Pro theme and delete it. Don’t worry deleting the theme doesn’t delete its settings at all.

Then visit Appearance>Themes>Add New and upload the zip you just downloaded of the new theme.

And Activate.

That’s it. Hope you enjoy the updated latest theme.

Regards,
Shri

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