[pensacoladisabilitylawyer]

Reviving this as I'm trying to figure out whether to go Forum only or Forum plus Buddypress.

Anitac: when you say, "I actually have it installed on a test site I am building using the News theme", do you mean you have both bbpress and buddypress installed, or just one?

In terms of deciding what to want - it is mainly for discussion forum for marketing ideas for attorneys. I like the social network side of things just in case groups want to create groups for their individual niches (bankruptcy, disability, personal injury, etc).

[pensacoladisabilitylawyer]

Thanks, Brad! It is interesting you posted here. I was just checking out your explanation on how to add CTA to this child theme:
http://wpsites.net/web-design/move-call-to-action-next-to-slider-in-executive-pro-theme/
In the comments someone asked about responsiveness of your tutorial. Is your modification mobile responsive?

[pensacoladisabilitylawyer]

I checked as late as last night, and it still wasn't working. But now it does appear that this has resolved.

I don't even know what happened!

[pensacoladisabilitylawyer]

Good idea. Tried it, but it didn't work.

Any other ideas?

[pensacoladisabilitylawyer]

Yes! Yes, I did.

In case anyone else has this problem: Looks like it my have been my child theme which is a custom theme from web-savvy-marketing:

"It's actually the child theme.

Both the default sidebars are unregistered in the functions.php file.

unregister_sidebar('sidebar');
unregister_sidebar('sidebar-alt');

Simple sidebars only works with those sidebars so if they are unregistered, nothing will appear in the sidebar selection on posts or pages."

I deleted the two "unregister" lines above from my functions.php file and the Simple Sidebars plugin is working again with drop downs!

[pensacoladisabilitylawyer]

@bill-murray "My sense is you have a problem (slow page loads) and are throwing too many solutions at the problem (eg, CloudFlare and CloudFront)."

From what I've read, it does not create a conflict to have CloudFlare and CloudFront together.

"Your site has too much page weight (at 1.76 Mb), largely due to too many images."

I don't know how to get the "weight" down any more.

"Beyond the page weight, as others have already said in this thread, the variation in the page loads are due to the design of your shared host."  That is kind of what I am asking here. Trying to determine how to verify that it is a server-side problem more than anything else.

"In 10 tests I did simulating a 5 Mb/sec connection (not using the tools mentioned here), your site had a median page load time of 25.3 secs, which means half of the 10 tests were above that. The fastest load time was 9.1 secs (very poor) and the worst was 55.9 secs (ridiculous). Of course, those results come down assuming a faster internet connection (the median drops to 18.4 secs with a 20 Mb/sec fiber connection), but not everyone has a fiber connection. As I am sure you know, page speed is costing you $ if organic search traffic impacts your business results."

Again, this is relatively obvious and why I am asking the questions here.

"We do managed WP hosting and our pricing is $10 or $20/mo, and we’ll move your site for free, but we do things differently from the other managed hosts you mentioned. Still, before you consider managed WP hosts, I think you’d be well served to streamline and declutter your site (or plan to do that as part of the move). Ask yourself if you need all of the scripts you are loading. Streamlining alone won’t solve your problem, but that is in your best interest."

Again, I'm trying to figure out how to streamline and declutter the site. I think my efforts have shown that I'm trying to streamline and declutter.  I am not a tech. That is why I am here. I'm trying to streamline and declutter.

"We would load your site much, much faster (without CloudFront, CloudFlare, or any caching plugins), but we’d really push you to do the streamlining. For a speed comparison, you can look at http://readyfolio2.wpperform.com/ ; that site’s homepage is about 700 Kb, and first visit page load is about 1.2 secs over 20 Mb/sec fiber and repeat views (because we do use aggressive caching) are at 6/10′s of a second. I think that’s typical of the page speed we deliver, and that’s what you need to be competitive. If your pages are loading in over 2 seconds, that’s too slow."

There is little information out there on WPPerform. You only have a landing page, and when I put email in the contact form it threw an error that I needed to put in a name (there is only one box asking for email).  Looks like you contribute a lot around here. But throwing an error on a one page landing page is not very reassuring.

[pensacoladisabilitylawyer]

That was my impression. Weird thing with  WPEngine is that they said they would not migrate site, but they have good documentation on how to migrate, or, in the alternative, they recommended a company, thewpvalet.com, that charges "starting at $249" for migration. Yowza!

[pensacoladisabilitylawyer]

I did research last night on other hosts. I was looking at Synthesis or WPEngine.

Many said that I wouldn't see any difference from HostGator, that I'd just be paying a premium for fancier support.

From what I can tell, I could see real gains. Thoughts?

[pensacoladisabilitylawyer]

I have done most of the recommendations, even set up CloudFlare and Amazon CloudFront for CDN.

Site loads in 2.9 seconds in some instances and 29 seconds 15 minutes later with no changes made to site.

Called HostGator. They refuse to admit it is a server-side issue. Say it has to do with (a) scripts and (b) they said that the htaccess file was really junked-up. (I looked in there and didn't see any glaring problems (not that I would know what I'm looking for). I expected to see hundreds of lines of code and there were like 75-100.

Hellobar does seem to delay things though....

 

[pensacoladisabilitylawyer]

anitac,  you rule! that worked!!

[Author]

Posts