Hi Clelia,
I have reinstalled Visual Composer Plugin in your site but it is still not showing in your plugins page.
So there is something conflicting with that plugin.
Can you create a staging site then try testing for a plugin conflict. You can do this by deactivating all third party plugins, and seeing if the problem remains. If it’s fixed, you’ll know a plugin caused the problem, and you can narrow down which one by reactivating them one at a time.
Let us know how it goes!
Hi Paul, the thing is… I can try and do that (if my hosting provider helps me. But I still don’t get why the issue is just for that one article. It baffles me. I use VC everywhere, why the conflict (if that’s the reason) is just in there? Tomorrow I will speak with my hosting provider to see what we can do with the stage site.
I’ll keep you posted.
Hi Clelia,
Actually, the fact that the Visual Composer is installed but not showing in the plugins is extremely strange and shows there is a fundamental problem on your installation.
It is needed a need to check this via your hosting service provider. Now regarding the article in question, there indeed might be something happening with the usage of the elements or code that you added to the page which I can not find the reason.
The best way before moving the website to a staging version is to add a new post and try to recreate the same page from scratch, try to do the same stuff you do but this time step by step, and in each step check the speed. That is the only way you will find the reason why this is only happening in that specific article other than the possibility of the server restrictions due to the fact that your article is too long and heavy.
Thank you.
Thanks, I have spoken to my hosting provider and they are investigating as we speak, still i’m not sure a staging website is the solution. By the way, do you know whether using cornerstone for building blog posts and pages is better than VC (for the site speed both for the users and for the edits?)
I want to keep the nice layout I can create with VC as it leads to more conversions but if this has to be an issue for the page speed I don’t know if it’s worth it so I’m looking for other options.
As usual I keep you posted on what my hosting provider will tell me
Hello @klelietta,
Thanks for updating the thread. 
In my experience I haven’t noticed much of difference between Cornerstone and VC in terms of page load time. However, we suggest our customers to consider Cornerstone as it’s fully integrated and works pretty much fine with X Theme. More often then not page load time is impacted because of the hosts, use of sub standard plugins, heavy media files etc.
Sure, please let us know the message you receive from hosting company.
Thanks.
Hi Again,
So my hosting provider investigated and couldn’t find any issue on their side, they suggested to get back to you as they are not familiar with the VC plugin that is integrated with the Theme and this is obviously your area of expertise. The issue is confirmed to be only related to that specific post. They said that only who developed the plug in (in this case it’s your integration so it falls under your developers’s responsibility) can help with the issue.
Thanks for a prompt reply. I am completely stuck here, the theme tells me to ask my hosting provider and my hosting provider tells me they have checked everything and send me back to my theme customer service. It’s getting frustrating and I’m losing good money because I can’t publish this article.
Thanks
Hi Clelia,
Since that is the only specific post that is getting the issue. I recommend that you re-create that post adding the elements bits by bits and checking the load times each time. That way we can narrow down which elements is causing the issue.
Please don’t delete that post, just create a new one to re-create.
Thanks
It MIGHT be a good solution, if it werent for the tiny detail that it’s a super complex post with more than 13k words and so many elements and images… it took me 2 weeks to create the layout… not exactly the quickest solution. Is there any other way to check this? I can’t spend 2 weeks recreating the post… I remember that in the beginning it was working ok, then one day, randomly it started getting stuck. After i finished to add my last element (it’s a top 20 list and each chapter has the same elements, the only thing that changes is the text and images, I doubt that is the issue… I don’t know what to do anymore and I am not even thiking about deleting it after all the hours of work i put into it. I need to get it fixed as it’s for a client waiting and it’s important.
Please can you suggest another solution? don’t you have any way/tool to check on your side? ask the developer to have a look at it? I’m running out of ideas in here and i wouldn’t be so persistent if it werent SO IMPORTANT.
Hi Clelia,
First of all, I want to mention that we totally understand that it takes so much time to create the page and now that does have the problem it is frustrating to start from scratch.
Unfortunately, we do not have any tool or mean to find out why this is happening. The fact that it is happening only on one page just shows it is not related to the plugin itself as if it was the other pages should have the same problem.
But as it is a very long page the server factor comes in that might have the issue. So, in general, there are 2 possible cases:
The server cannot handle that big of a page when in the Visual Composer. Which we already asked you to move your website to your local machine or another server to test.
There is an element which is causing the issue, which it is not possible for us to check and you need to double check the case.
One thing that you can do is to install the duplicate post plugin and copy the page, then in the newly copied page try to remove the elements one by one to see if there is an element which is causing the problem. In this test, if you see that after removing certain amount of the element no matter which element that is, the page works faster it is 100% server problem not being able to handle the elements from a certain point.
Please consider that even if there is a bug of some kind in the builder (which I doubt as there are many many people using this plugin) we will not be able to fix it, we will be able to only report this to the developers of the Visual Composer to be considered for the upcoming releases.
Anyway, if you are trying to start things from scratch I suggest that you check the Cornerstone as it is the go-to builder for X.
Thank you for your understanding.
Thank you
I am about to take a plane and will test with the duplicate content option once i reach my destination. From now on i will try to find different solutons when writing massive posts as clearly the VC slows down things adding more code to the already big files.
I keep you posted
Sure! Let us know how it goes.
Hi
So, I’ve followed your advice and duplicate the post and then i proceeded by deleting a lot of containers reducing the post from 13k words to 5200 words and that seemed to have almost solved the issue. Now yes using VC when i update the post is slightly slow in the beginning (around 10 seconds to load the editing page with VC) but I can add text and immediately save it without waiting ages to be able to click on the save button.
So, does this mean that is the server that can’t handle such a big amount of words using vc? (as the server is able to handle it NOT using VC).
What are your suggestions in this specific case? I need to contact my hosting provider and then what? what should I ask them exactly? I really don’t know how to approach this issue with them because usually the other posts are not that problematic and I think that maybe nesting too much with VC and adding elements/columns/buttons /colors surely impacts the heaviness of the page.
I don’t want to completely leave the page builders in order to increase the speed of the page as these are landing pages for affiliates and they convert much better with a nice layout, always obtained with VC.
Any suggestion is highly appreciated!
Thank you
Hey Clelia,
That might be the case. It might be related to database memory limits and/or database server performance. What your host should do is to monitor the resources while you edit the post.
Are you editing the long VC article in your live host? When you’re using a page builder, it uses server resources and your host might limit your resource usage once you used up what’s allocated for your plan. This is another factor but since they already troubleshooted before, I believe this is not the case.
Have you tried copying your site to a local server other other staging servers? This is a quick way to know if the issue with the server or VC has a performance issue. Try editing the post in a local server maybe it’ll run smoothly. Once done, you can copy the VC content to your live site.
Also try increasing your max_execution_time to 600.
Just note that, as @christopher.amirian said, we as support have no means to trace the cause of the issue on our own. What we can do is report this to our development team so they could forward this to Visual Composer’s developers.
For now, the only solution would be to use Cornerstone.
Thanks.
Thank you Christian, I will try to do that “local server” test (sorry no idea on how to do it)… If my hosting provider is one, how can I check on a “local server”? (I wanted to ask you to try on your server and even copied the html in a note but this was probably nonsense as all the images are in my database and were not showing up.
Thanks again for your help
Hey Clelia,
For a local server, try using Local by Flywheel. It’s the easiest I’ve tested. Once you get that up and running, you will need to create a new WP site in your local machine and then import your live site there using a site copy/migration plugin like Duplicator.
Another quick way is to use http://poopy.life/. In there, you can install X and Visual Composer only and test your content. To download Visual Composer in there, you need to assign the temporary site domain to your Staging Environment in your license page. See this article for more details.
We could try the content in our test server just to see the performance. The images will connect to your live site so they’ll load unless you have hot link protection in your server. If the content is also slow on our end, we’ll post this in our issue tracker.
Thanks.
Thanks Christian! You’re super helpful.
I will add a private note in here.
It struggled a bit on my end too. It finished loading at around 1 minute (see Secure Note). Another factor to take into account here is your computer hardware’s specs. It would be faster to load if you have a high performance hardware.
The amount of content is not good for front-end also unless you have something like lazy loading of elements.
I’ll post your content to our issue tracker. Maybe the VC developers might provide a performance update in the future.
For now, I’d recommend you split your content into several posts.
Thanks.
Thans Christian, the things is… my computer hardware might not be the faster ever but with other long blog posts is ok (with no VC). So that shouldn’t be the main issue. I think that VC, using it with a lot of nesting and shortcodes adds a lote of extra code and on long posts like this, the issue is super evident? I find that on shorter posts (not more than 3-4k words) VC performs normally, after that it exponentially starts to slow down until it gets completely stuck.
Thanks for submitting this issue to the developers. I am aware that using VC and other page builders for super long content is not ideal because it adds the extra code but getting a post completely stuck is a bit too much.
I will split the post in 2 (I was already working on it today), the situation gets slightly better at least and for future long posts like this I’ll have to find another solution because also using another page builder like Cornerstone will add code too and we are at square one again… Too bad as I need a certain type of post (quite long) and layout to convert my affiliate links.
Thanks again for your help
Clelia
You’re most welcome Clelia.
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