Any Tips To Improve Magazine Pro Speed?

[William]

I have a site that's well suited to a theme like Magazine Pro, but it seems to be much slower than some of the other StudioPress themes. I'm basing that using tests from tools.pingdom.com, relying upon their New York server as a common test site. Also, I'm testing the themes on the StudioPress demo site, e.g., demo.studiopress.com/magazine.

Most StudioPress themes that I've tested have sub-second responses. Magazine Pro seems to jump well above into the 2 second range when I run the tests.

Is this because it uses a number of Featured Post widgets, or is there something else I can do to make it load faster?

---

–William
http://williambeem.com

[nutsandbolts]

The demo seems to be loading slowly because of the number of images on the page, but honestly, it's impossible to know how a theme will perform until you use it on your site with your content. Different hosts and server configurations, as well as the number of requests on the page, will impact how quickly a site loads much more than what theme it uses.

---

Andrea Whitmer, Owner/Developer, Nuts and Bolts Media
I provide development and training services for designers • Find me on Twitter and Google+

[William]

That's why I'm using the theme demo as a source. The assumption is that it's hosted in its most favorable configuration and may only get slower as a user loads my stuff onto the theme.

Right now, it's slower than the other models on the showroom floor. I'm trying to understand what elements are slowing it down, considering that it likely has the same hosting and underlying architecture.

---

–William
http://williambeem.com

[worldviewpr]

I am really happy using Sythesis hosting. Mag Pro is routinely loading at around 1.0-1.2 secs with page speed score 600-800, depending on images. per

http://www.webpagetest.org/result/131104_JB_7AA/

But I am using CDN, Smush.it and W3TC. So it really is going to depend on your host, dom files, cache regimen, etc.

My biggest beef is that the chief bottlenecks are not the theme or host bu google font api and cloudfront and quantserve each costing anywhere from 200 to 400ms to load. I hope google fonts installed somehow is a way to mitigate this but rough going for me understanding best approach to that.

[William]

Thanks, that's encouraging. My own site is on WP Engine and it needs a lot of optimization before I'm pleased. However, I've found the same issue with TypeKit or Google Fonts being a drag on the load times.

I still need to activate my CDN for my site and tweak a few other things. That's why I was testing on the demo site to see a baseline compared to other themes. Magazine Pro is still slower than the other themes there.

---

–William
http://williambeem.com

[William]

OK, working with Pingdom showed me where to find my bottlenecks. I learned something that many others already know. JetPack is a huge suck on performance. While I like the Stats module, I can do without most of it. Since I have Google Analytics, I deactivated JetPack (though I do like its statistics better than Google's).

Short story, now I'm getting better performance on my site with Magazine Pro than the demo site on StudioPress. It's still a heavier child theme than some of the others, but just killing JetPack was a major improvement in performance.

---

–William
http://williambeem.com

[worldviewpr]

That's great news, William. I obsess about this all the time. I have a love-hate relationship with Jetpack and am entering a new hate cycle. I need to solve the google font api latency. Will also jettison jetpack and alexa/quancast apis. worhtless for a site like mine. If there is any clue out there on how to make cloud front and google font servers not be such a drag let us know.

[theseozone]

I have this exact issue right now with Magazine Pro. I uninstalled JetPack and that decreased my average load times from about 4000ms to 2500ms. I also uninstalled and deactivated all my plugins which took it down to about 2000ms on average. The site is still loading really slow. Most of my other sites load in under 1 second.

I am using pingdom.com and Google Chrome to test load speeds and get the breakdown of what is loading slow. However, all I see is the main URL taking 2 seconds on average. I am not sure if this is the page or just the request to find the site host. Is this the site or my Web host? Thanks.

Response Times
http://karmamag.com/temp/karmamag-response-times.PNG

Pingdom:
http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/cADP4e/http://karmamag.com/

[nutsandbolts]

I see that your Pingdom test had a bit of a wait to go from non-www to www, so you'll likely see faster load times if you put in the www when entering your site URL in the box. That said, the wait time is still pretty long (likely the server end of things) while the individual elements load very quickly. The only bottleneck I see there is waiting on the server for the initial DNS handshake and not any theme elements loading slowly.

---

Andrea Whitmer, Owner/Developer, Nuts and Bolts Media
I provide development and training services for designers • Find me on Twitter and Google+

[theseozone]

Thanks Andrea,
I swapped the redirect so now karmamag.com loads faster. However, if someone includes the www. they will be redirected to the non-www now and have to wait another second.

I ran another test on webpagetest.org and found more detail about the connection time (link below). I also grabbed a screen shot below of where I think that first 2 seconds is going. It looks like it's HTML, JS, and images that are taking the longest part of the load time in that first 2 seconds. The connection graph shows the DNS lookup and initial connection at less that .2 seconds. Am I reading this correctly?
http://www.webpagetest.org/result/141024_ZR_92cd2895d6066ccb48f2b777207ba197/1/details/

http://karmamag.com/temp/karmamag-response-times-02.PNG

I have not put a lot of content on the site yet so, I don't see why this is already happening. I asked my Web host about it and they recommended I go through steps for making WordPress sites faster. I have already done most of them but, no luck yet. https://wiki.hostek.com/WordPress#Wordpress_Slowness_Troubleshooting

Thanks.

[theseozone]

Thanks Andrea,
I swapped the redirect so now karmamag.com loads faster. However, if someone includes the www. they will be redirected to the non-www now and have to wait another second.

I ran another test on webpagetest.org and found more detail about the connection time (link below). I also grabbed a screen shot below of where I think that first 2 seconds is going. It looks like it's HTML, JS, and images that are taking the longest part of the load time in that first 2 seconds. The connection graph shows the DNS lookup and initial connection at less that .2 seconds. Am I reading this correctly?
http://www.webpagetest.org/result/141024_ZR_92cd2895d6066ccb48f2b777207ba197/1/details/

http://karmamag.com/temp/karmamag-response-times-02.PNG

I have not put a lot of content on the site yet so, I don't see why this is already happening. I asked my Web host about it and they recommended I go through steps for making WordPress sites faster. I have already done most of them but, no luck yet. https://wiki.hostek.com/WordPress#Wordpress_Slowness_Troubleshooting

Thanks.

[Author]

Posts