I am finding that the forum is taking forever to load compared to the rest of my site. It is getting hung up on the two ads I have set up (one at top of page and one at bottom). Is there some kind of conflict with the forum and the ads? Is there some setting I need to adjust?
I’m frustrated waiting for every single forum page I click on to load for ten to thirty seconds so I can only imagine how many people are just clicking away.
This is my forum: http://sallieborrink.com/forum/
Thank you!
Well – let’s start with this which is something I wrote up before:
It is not realistic to make a direct comparison between the forum loading time and other pages within a WordPress site. WordPress posts and pages are static. The do not change from moment to moment, they can generally be shown to anyone (even if needing to be logged in to the site) and the data underpinning the display is very lightweight.
Forums are completely the opposite. On a busy forum, the data can be changing and being added to second my second – often with many users adding content simultaneously. This makes for a very rich environment but the cost will always be the extra ‘work’ the code and database has to do to load up a view. Remember too that the forum display is uniquely tailored for the current user loading the page. One user will see a different view than the next user depending on what the have and have not read, what their forum permissions are and what forum or topic they may be looking at. And even on a quiet forum, the checks and changes are still required.
I would suggest taking a look in our codex at this page however: https://simple-press.com/documentation/codex/installation/installation-information/performance-notes/
But – having said all that – I was out when your post arrived and I looked at it on my mobile phone on the local 3G network. I loaded your forum in fact and was really rather surprised that you should call this slow. Back now and I have just loaded it on my laptop and again – I see no great slowness. In fact, I would say quite the opposite. It looks to be humming along very nicely. If you are seeing a serious slowdown then it could be that something is getting loaded and slowing things down because you are a WordPress (and forum) admin.
As to the ads – no – SP has no effect whatsoever. But the speed of ads to display is dependent upon the server they are being loaded from. All requests to third party servers is going to slow things down a bit.
By the way – your forum does not look good on a phone. This is because you are not using one of our more recent and responsive themes. Not sure about your Wp theme – I did not go outside of the forum page.
Thank you for your response! I did not realize my forum theme wasn’t responsive so I just added the Reboot theme. I like it much better so that’s a double win. (My website has been responsive for a long time.)
And it’s helpful to know that the ads and theme don’t have any issues together.
I have another question now with the Reboot theme, but I’ll start a different thread for that.
Thank you!