I have a few website’s I’m running using the Elementor-based Sonaar theme. My main site is a great example:
[https://andraleia.com])I’m using this theme because a) it’s geared towards musicians, in a way wherein if I choose to use it to stream & showcase my music (eventually) there’s great player functionalities, built in portfolio tools, etc., and b) because it looks really, really nice
That said… it runs like \*ass\* on Dreamhost.
Every site I’ve setup with it takes a good 5-10 seconds to even get it to show… anything. Once it starts loading things it’s better, but it’s still slow
Even the wp-panel goes that slow, though? I’m not sure why.
My \*guess\*: I think it could be something to do with the wordpress database for my hosting being so overloaded with behind-the-scenes-sh\*t from the Sonaar install & the way I’ve implemented it, that with the limited shared-server resources Dreamhost provides, it takes forever for it to even “boot” a WordPress-task to send a simple request like, “load the admin panel”
I want to start optimizing things. I’d like to figure out the best way to do so
I know people talk a lot about CDN & so-on; I don’t know if that’s the solution here or not, as I’m guessing it has to do with CPU / computational-power rather than large-file-delivery? But I could be wrong
Any advice of where to start? My currently active plugins are limited to:
* Contact From 7
* Elementor
* Elementor Sonaar Addons
* Essential Grid, Flamingo
* Iron Demo Improter
* Slider Revolution
* Yoast Duplicate Post
* Yoast SEO
I will say I’m \*open\* to a Sonaar-less rebuild. I’m not using a lot of things I couldn’t build / style myself, or source from lightweight plugins, etc. But I’d like to first see if there’s a way to speed-up what I have going…
EDIT: Here’s a gtmetrix result – [https://gtmetrix.com/reports/andraleia.com/gR2bTMyl/])
And again… I’m aware I’m using a lot of large media files; but the fact that TTFB is so high, that even the wp-panel runs \*SO\* slow… leads me to think that it’s less about the media files, more about something else
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If even the admin pages are slow, it’s definitely a hosting issue. Move to a better host (WPEngine is great, but not cheap).
Whats the php version currently active? Wp-panel loading slow could be a sign of functions crashing used by plugins.
Have you tried downgrading the php version and also can you share the current configurations?
If you’re on shared hosting, that would likely be a big bottle neck. Dreamhosts VPS hosting is great for WordPress though, and upgrading your account is easy.
It’s about both. Improving hosting will help but you can’t have several big video files and a lot of large static images that need compression and have a quickly loading site. Downloading/streaming a lot of data simply takes time and kills your performance.
You need to take the time to optimize the still images, they don’t need to be that large and it’s low hanging fruit. First, unless there’s transparency needed, never use PNG, use JPEGs. Your JUMPY image is 1.8m as a PNG. I saved it, opened it and exported as a JPG and the resulting image is a) visually the same and b) 282k – 7x smaller.
If you have a lot of images, you can install and use something like EWWW which will let you convert/compress the images without reuploading them. It will also convert and compress new images as you upload them.
Do that for every single PNG image. Save JPG at about 85% quality and the images will be much smaller. For the videos, ask yourself if you really need all of those on the home page. Ideally you’d load 1 or 2, not several.
The bottom line is you’re loading a 14.2m home page and no host will make that truly fast.