eMember Slowing Website Down

[Leonardi]

Hi,

eMember seems to be slowing my site down – I noticed the problem soon after activating the plugin (a few days ago) and it seems to be slowing down both the frontend and the WordPress backend.

Pages were loading within 2-3 seconds prior to activating the plugin, whereas I’m finding now that they are typically taking longer than 10 seconds. I’ve not activated any other plugins in the meantime, so it does appear to be eMember that’s causing the site to load slowly.

Do you know what might be causing the issue? I’ve used Firebug to try and find out what the issue is, but it’s not clear. I notice that the plugin adds a few JavaScript calls in the footer, but not sure if that’s causing the problem?

Any help would be appreciated – it’s becoming quite frustrating.

My site is [http://www.vooshthemes.com/]

[Ivy]

Hi Leonardi, I had a look at your site I used yslow and the load times on a fresh load where bout 3 seconds. I tried multiple pages and the only loading delays happened on pages that had large images (this added about 2-3 seconds to the load time). The eMember login page took 2.4 seconds to load. Can you point me to the page you are having this issue on?

Cheers,

Ivy

[amin007]

It’s impossible for eMember to slow a site down from 2 seconds to 10 seconds! The plugin was developed keeping the performance side of things in mind because I personally use it.

“I’ve not activated any other plugins in the meantime” – Remember you didn’t do anything doesn’t mean “something” didn’t change on your server… hosting providers can always update software on the servers and move things around, there could be a network congestion the possibilities are endless.

With that said… the easiest test you could do is:

1) Deactivate eMember and load your site in the browser (keep an eye on the load time).

2) Activate eMember and load you site in the browser (keep an eye on the load time).

Do the above a few times and confirm if there is a relationship between these two.

Firebug alone does not help you measure your site performance… You want the Yahoo’s YSlow or Google’s Page Speed Addon then measure your site performance with and without eMember and see the difference.

I just tested your site with YSlow and I see the following combonents to have a “F” (bad) rating:

1. Use a Content Delivery Network.

2. Add Expires Header.

3. Compress component with gzip.

4. Configure Entity Tags (ETags).

All of those are outside the realm of a WordPress plugin.

You can’t just activate a plugin and then few days later come to a conclusion that “That plugin must be slowing my site down without actually running performance test properly”… that is very wrong.

Btw, you have a nice site

[Leonardi]

Hi Amin & Ivy,

Thanks for getting back to me.

I should have elaborated further in my previous message – when setting up eMember I created a copy of my site (for testing purposes) that had eMember activated whilst my main site didn’t.

I didn’t do any detailed/strict performance tests, but it was clear that my main site was loading much faster than the test site and this remained consistent over a few days. I did make some changes to my theme through adding some new images, but that shouldn’t have made much of an impact as they were (relatively) small in size.

I’m aware of the YSlow issues and will be addressing them – however, they were issues before the plugin was activated, so I’m not sure how much of an impact they’ll have on speed.

Of course, as you say, when I activated the plugin it could have coincided with some changes being made on the server and I’ll look into that. I just wanted to get in touch with you first to see if there were any known issues/conflicts that could potentially cause a site to slow down when the plugin is being used.

If it’s impossible for eMember to cause a site to slow that significantly it would clearly suggest something else is causing the problem. I’ll look into it further and see if I can isolate the issue – although I have to say the site does seem to be loading much faster today.

Thanks both for your help – appreciate it

[Author]

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