are you sure cloudflare is configured right? misconfiguration can cause horrible load times…  also saw it waiting for couple external requests…

you could also try turning on the forum combines js and css caches on forum – options – general settings…  but wont make a huge diff… 

took about 4 seconds for me which is indeed a bit slow… but was on par with the load time for the main page as well…

Update from ISP:

“You may need to have your developer look into this one for you. When opening the forum it’s causing the load on the server to spike up significantly to the point where flat-chat.com.au is using up all of it’s allocated CPU usage. You’ll need to have your developer or software provider take a look and see why it’s using up so many resources.”

Sadly, there is no developer.  Just me.

I came out of cloudflare as I wanted to use the ISP’s free SSL and it isn’t compatible with Cloudflare.

Maybe i need to rethink that.

Habve switched on caching, as suggested and removed Cloudflare completely.  It seems to be a bit smoother. Will check again later.

Is there a caching plugin that would make it all faster that you would recommend?

if you use a caching plugin, you will need to disable it on the wp page the forum is displayed on it…  it will likely believe that wp page is static and cache it when in reality, its dynamic content using standard wp hooks and filters…

It seems to be a problem with “unauthorised pages” being called via the Forum, related to the installation of SSL.  I am just doing a back-up and using another “search-and-replace” plugin to see if that fixes it.  I’ll keep you posted

I have just got up here in the UK and have been trying your site before I read all this and I am seeing minimal difference between forum and non-forum page load times. None of then great but none a disaster either.

As to SSL have you double checked that

1. Both URLs in the WP Admin Settings > General are set to https?
2. The forum permalink at admin > forum > Page and Permalink is updated correctly to https?

Some plugins that try and take over https loading seem to not set these correctly.

I just popped back to let you know that I used a plugin called ‘Better Search and Replace’ to update the prefixes in a file with the suffix “_1sfposts” .  The Forum is firing on all cylinders now.  Fingers crossed!

Good news. However, please do check those settings as suggested just to make sure.

Good news. However, please do check those settings as suggested just to make sure.

Spoke too soon.

It seems to get very slow when I go into the older material via the various topic headings (rather than the “recent posts”).

By the way, I checked the permalinks and they are OK.

I wonder if this is just a function of having too many posts or topics that have to be called up every time you go into a specific forum.

I’m tempted to purge everything older than five years but I have a gut feeling that I will be looking for something I need within hours of doing so.

Is there an archive option so that only newer posts are accessed in the first instance?

Or am I barking up the wrong tree (again)?

did you verify the cloudflare settings?

As Andy and I have both said, we dont see any difference between other site pages and forum pages in loading times…  and I dont see significant load times either…

have you tried this as a standard user or guest, vice as admin?  perhaps you are running other plugins that slow it down for wp admins??  worth a quick test, I think…

you only have 21k posts – that is not a large number and a limited number of users too…  we have sites with millions of users and thousands of simultaneous active users…  its not the size of you forum…  additionally, we dont load all post ever…  the only posts loaded are the ones needed on that particular page…  the most you ever seem to be loading is 20 posts per page…  the number of topics and posts shown is a configurable option if you want to lower those numbers…  you can tweak them on forum – options – display settings…  you could also try reducing the number of recent posts shown in the sidebar…  but if it comes down to those, more than likely would be a server capability issue… is this shared hosting, vsp, or dedicated (or other)?

I removed the cloudflare plugin completely.

The site is working better now but I am still getting the “this page is trying to load scripts from an unauthorised source” warning on this website and no others.

I think it’s most likely to be an accumulation of old problems that have been half solved so I’m biting the bullet and opening the wallet and getting the whole website overhauled (including getting on to PHP7 on the ISP).

It’s not shared hosting and I am usually well within my limits.  

Thanks for your advice.  The page is running a lot better now … but that warning is a worry that needs to be addressed.

The console message regarding the the scripts should also give you the url that is being asked for. Last time I looked at your site it seemed to be a problem loading a google font that is, presumably, being requested by your WP theme. But that should be easy to double check in the browser console.