Site Speed, Portfolio Errors and Filtering

Hi there

I was in a trail of messages this week, but they’ve all disappeared from APEX for some reason. The blog page on my website is loading extremely slowly; how can this be sped up?

I was told in the last message trail that if I updated x theme, it would resize the images that appear under the portfolio page. The blog page template was set to portfolio, but nothing showed up at all then. Please explain how to get this to work.

I was told to send my login details so that you could login to see what was going on, but I don’t know how to do this securely. I was sent a cut and paste message telling me to browse the forum to find instructions on how to send my login details securely, but nothing relevant came up when I did the search. Please tell me how to send my login details to you securely/privately.

Please explain to me how to add your filtering mechanism (as shown on your demo sites) onto the blog page .

Thanks

Additionally, since updating the theme, all search results are showing with two identical image (view here) - one with an awful link button which shows upon mouseover. Please explain how to fix this so that only one image comes up (the one without the link button on mouseover)

Hi Kate,

Thank you for writing in, your blog page is not slow, it actually loads (6.04s) fast, but take 19s to finished because of some images delayed loading. But if you take a look at those images load-time below the latest one only take 0.692s to be loaded, so the images are not really the problem. I think that delayed image loading is intended by your “load more” plugin so all of your featured images won’t be loaded simultaneously, that can cause a bottleneck issue that slows the performance of the site.


Add this to Theme Options > CSS to hide the default (with link icon) featured image on the search result page.

.search-results .entry-featured .entry-thumb {
	display: none;
}

Regarding the secure note, click at this icon on the lower-right of your post/reply, that is where you place a credential.


Hope that helps,
Cheers!

Thank you for sending the code - that’s been added in and has reduced the load time a bit. However, according to gtmetrix, despite adding this code, I am still getting very slow load times - gtmetrix highlights image size as a high priority - in fact my blog page is recording as taking 13.2 seconds to load any of its posts, which is far too long for any visitor to hang around. Yes it loads the featured image quickly, but no visitor wants to stare at a featured image for 13.2 seconds in the hope that the blog posts do load. Traffic is being lost because of these awful load times. https://gtmetrix.com/reports/thegayweddingguide.co.uk/mVHy7b1o.

Thank you for the secure note info - I’ll send those detail over next.

Hey @KateLovell,

I checked your GTmetrix result and the negative reports are not because of X.

Please follow our performance guide here to fix most issues. Please note that you have to take into account many things with regards to website optimization. X is already optimized in and of itself. The rest of the factors are outside the theme’s control.

Thanks.

Ok, thank you. I was told previously that if I updated x theme, it would resize the images that appear under the portfolio page. The blog page template was set to portfolio, but nothing showed up at all then. Please explain how to get this to work.

Please can you explain to me how to add your filtering mechanism (as shown on your demo sites) onto the blog page.
thanks

Hi there,

I am not sure what are you talking about the portfolio resize functionality. All the images of the archive pages are resized depending on the layout in our theme, but the original source should be optimized in the first place. That is something that you can achieve with Photo editing software such as Photoshop.

As my colleague mentioned you need to follow the steps mentioned in the article he gave the link to.

If you want to turn a page into a portfolio filtering one you need to go to the Page Templates and choose the Portfolio Layout option:

Kindly open up new threads for additional questions as it will help us to focus on each issue and give you a better support which you deserve. Having a long threads makes the maintaining job harder and also it will be harder for the other customers to find the correct information if they have similar issues. You are always welcomed to reply to this thread to follow up the same question.

Thank you.

Than you - I was wanting to the portfolio layout for the blog section in an attempt to speed the load time, however it looks as though every single blog post would need to be converted/duplicated to a portfolio post. I don’t think this was made clear, as this is why when the blog page was set to the portfolio template, nothing showed up. I will open the filtering questions and duplication errors on a different thread.

Hi There,

Yes, your blog posts won’t show up on the Portfolio index page because that is supposed to show portfolio posts, and converting a page to Portfolio Layout is not really the solution for speeding up your site performance.

You can do some of the performance tips provided here instead.

Like I said above your images are already optimized (they load fast), what the GTMetrix means to “Serve scaled images” is to resize your images to somewhere (378px by 173px) using a photo editor (e.g. Photoshop) and re-upload it to your site. There is one trick that might resolve this but most likely reduce the quality of your images in other areas of your site (not recommended). That is to reduce the Settings > Media > Large size, and use this plugin to regenerate the images with the updated size.

I checked your Posts Grid Settings and you have the Total Items as 99999 technically that will load all your posts, and yeah that takes time. Try to reduce that, somewhere 20-40 items.

Always clear your caching plugins for the changes to take effect immediately.

Your site loads fast on my end, so this could also be something on your local network, have you tried checking your site outside your local network and see how fast/slow it loads?

Thanks,

Hi - where do I change how many posts it’s set to load? ie where is post grid settings?

Hello There,

Thanks for updating in! Please edit the page and find the Post Grid element. Click edit and you will see the Post Grid Settings.

Hope this helps.

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