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Could be a resource issue. Here's a thread with a similar issue resolved by adding RAM.
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/white-screen-due-to-jetpack
When troubleshooting, log files are your friend. Look to see what they're telling you about problem issues.
–William
http://williambeem.comVPS with more resources won't fix the problem if your WordPress/SQL installation isn't optimized, or if you don't have sufficient bandwidth.
I moved to WP Engine a month ago from a HostGator VPS and it's a stark improvement. Sites that used to load in 6-10 seconds now load in sub-second times.
–William
http://williambeem.comThat's like having seat warmers in your car and never turning them on out of curiosity.
–William
http://williambeem.comOut of habit, I still click tags when I write a post. However, I do not display the tags on any pages of my site. Maybe one day I'll kick the habit.
–William
http://williambeem.comHere's why I recommend using a plugin for SEO instead of a theme. When it's time to change your theme, how does that impact your SEO? If you stay within Genesis, perhaps not so much. What if you decide to use a different theme down the road, though?
With a plugin, you keep that part of your site consistent. Also, there are more options to transport SEO data between popular plugins than there are for the various themes. You may decide to leave Yoast someday. If that happens, you'l only have to find a data transporter for SEO.
In other words, keep different aspects of your site in the best of breed containers. It isn't that Genesis SEO is bad, but changing the theme will impact more than the look of your site if you go that route.
–William
http://williambeem.comI haven't found a decent portfolio in any of the Genesis themes. My old portfolio theme was Gleam from Elegant Themes, but I would much rather have something that integrates with my Genesis theme.
I'm using Minimum Pro and it does have a portfolio, but it's an unattractive way to display images.
ZigZagPress has a full screen theme similar to Gleam, but it has a rather ugly block of text that seems to cover part of the image.
–William
http://williambeem.comBiased?
Perhaps so. You see, I've been through it all over the past few years. I started with shared hosting, went to a VPS for a few years, looked into building my own system. and recently moved to WP Engine as my host.
I didn't do it on a whim, either. I studied various hosts for a couple of months before I made the switch. HostGator's VPS was just going down the drain since they were bought out by EIG. Moving to a VPS costs me double to host my WordPress sites.
I may have gone with WebSynthesis, but it has more limitations on the number of sites than I could support, so that knocked them out of the running.
WP Engine isn't perfect, but neither is any other host. Overall, I find I'm pleased enough with the service that I would recommend it to others.
Now why would I recommend it to a small business? Because of the things you said. Small businesses often don't have IT support, and they don't need to worry about keeping a web site operational. That's something you can easily outsource to a premium host.
Also, you get a LOT of bang for your buck with performance, backups and service.
The choice really comes down to values and priorities, which are why I asked the questions I asked earlier.
–William
http://williambeem.comI recently switched to WP Engine web hosting and this is one of the features they offer. You can create a copy of your site in a staging area and work out the details behind the scenes. Same content, so you can evaluate how it looks when it goes live.
When you're ready, you can push a button to transfer the new changes to the live site.
–William
http://williambeem.comGet the Genesis Simple Edits plugin. Then you can remove the post meta and change some other aspects, too.
–William
http://williambeem.comWhat experience does he want his clients to have? Does he mind ranking lower in SERPs because he has a slower site? What is the business value of $27/month to have his site on a premium managed WordPress hosting site?
–William
http://williambeem.comHTML5 is one advantage, but the key advantage that I liked from the upgrade is the inclusion of Schema.org markup.
It's a good way of identifying key elements of each post, your site and the author to search engines. While it doesn't necessarily mean you will rank higher in search engines (today), it does enhance your ability to stand out in search engine results. It helps the search engines classify your content.
This is a growing trend in search results. While the new versions don't include every possible type of Schema markup, it does a lot of the heavy lifting for you and it works on all of your posts. You don't have to go back and retroactively edit each post to add Schema markup.
The question you have to answer is which holds more value for you: the modifications you paid to make on your current theme or the benefits available from the new version?
–William
http://williambeem.comWordPres SEO by Yoast does this. It has an option to remove stop words.
–William
http://williambeem.comAnother vote to remove JetPack. I like the WordPress stats, but it's not that big of a deal. I can get stats from Clicky, Woopra or other services that provide more detail, anyway.
Most of the features in JetPack weren't that interesting to me. By default, it seems to activate services whether you want them or not, so you end up getting another plugin just to make JetPack behave.
Since it makes calls to services outside of your server, it can add a delay to your load time. That likely varies depending upon which services are active.
–William
http://williambeem.comFirst, check out this article on Copyblogger. Next, read the eBook linked in the article. Both will give you a very good insight about WordPress performance.
I have a VPS on HostGator and it's gotten slower as EIG (the parent company of HostGator, BlueHost and other brands) continues to overload the servers. The poor performance just got unbearable, so I switched to WP Engine. Now my sites load in sub-second times.
As mentioned, plugins and other things you add onto your blog that reach out to other sites can have a detrimental impact upo your load time. JetPack is a notorious offender. AdSense takes time. You could be loading content from other sites who - in turn - also have to load content from another site. All of those loads take time.
The post I shared above lets you know what you can achieve with a managed WordPress host and a Genesis theme - without all the other plugins and bloat. It's more than zippy!
–William
http://williambeem.comIt's a background image. Although it wasn't designed to be a slider, I've found some folks who customized it to include a slider by doing some Google searches. I didn't check them out, as I was trying to solve a different problem. You may find an answer with some creative querying on Google.
–William
http://williambeem.comTheme changes are one of the reasons why I like to use Yoast instead of the theme's SEO fields. It's like choosing "best of breed" for your precious data, design, etc. Why lump it all together?
With that in mind, I'm wondering if it may be better for you to migrate your SEO info from Thesis to Yoast (or some SEO plugin of your choice) before migrating your theme. Break up the workload a bit.
–William
http://williambeem.comThat theme is actually capable of loading very quickly, but any theme will slow down if you load it with plugins and calls to other services. It could also be due to your hosting and other factors.
Here's a good post showing what you can do with that theme and a good host.
http://www.copyblogger.com/make-wordpress-faster/
–William
http://williambeem.comIf you're willing to switch hosts, there is another way. WP Engine has a staging site available for each one of your blogs. You can work on it at your leisure while your visitors see your site as it is.
To set it up, you push a button and it takes a snapshot of your current site. All the content, tables - everything. You work on it behind the scenes until you're ready to go to production.
Theoretically, you should be able to push another button to move it back to production. That didn't work quite right for me on my first try. Seemed to restore an older version of my theme. All of my content remained. It was just the theme and design that was different.
So, I'll end up copying the files over with SFTP. Not as convenient as the one-button push, but still much better and more relaxing than modifying your live site.
–William
http://williambeem.comI found a solution. If anyone else wants to change the header image of Minimum Pro to avoid backstretch and use a responsive image, please check out this tutorial. I just tried it on my staging site and it works as I expected and preferred.
http://youneedfat.com/responsive-image-minimum-pro/
–William
http://williambeem.com