World News Template very slow no help from gavick support

I have downloaded the world news template and my hosting company are telling me that i need to run a mile from gavick pro as this template is the slowest template they have ever seen. If you have ran a test on the speed then you will have found that the average speed is around 11 seconds when the speed should be around 2 seconds but when i have contacted gavick support they seem to feel that 11 seconds is good and i want to know what planet they are living on.

I have informed them that their template has serious problems but they do not seem to care. And i would like to know if anyone has sorted out the huge problems that the template has to get it to speed up.

If you download yslow with firefox then you will see all the problems that this site has. I have also been told from developer experts that this template has not been optimised.

If you have found a solution then let me know

Just for information you have to understand following.

These templates rely on if questions a lot when using joomla/components/modules/template settings/style settings and so on. Which means lot of questions asked back into the system while building final html output.

Questions with which news should be in news show pro gk4 for an example and so on.

I don't know what score you get with your setup but in demo website it gets Grade D, even joomla.org/peoples which uses jomsocial gets grade D due to too many complex codes and questions asked and retrieved during building final html output. So you would think joomla.org is bad designers or coders.

Also just for another note if you are following on your hosts suggestions keep in mind no hosts like these kind of templates as they use more resources then an average single html page. They will most of the time blame it either on the template or at the scripts complex as much as joomla...

the demo template is much faster than the actually template that you download. when you download the template you get a grade f. and also it is not just the hosting company. I contacted various developers about the issue as i may have to employ one to sort this mess out or build me a new template and they are all saying the same.

There are many negative issues with this template and it needs sorting out. I have tested templates from other clubs that i am a member of and none of them are as slow as this template which is shocking and i also have the template on a dedicated server.

I have just checked your website and it is Grade D... and I have also tested this template on my live server and it is quite ok compare to complexity of the template.

As an end users we don't have much choice to be honest, either less flexibility regarding positions, e.g which module show on which page as well as more options for end users to play around with in template options or slower with all the bells and whistles.

You have to understand template has logo selections in template options to make it easier for end user to select their logo which adds into code , execution time etc.
Template has color selections , font selections, social api and so on, every one of these checks adds extra time. Gavick can strip them of course but then again users will be asking for such features so he has to find balance in between...

So as you are building your website and or have a developer , they can strip these checks easily and have a faster template...

Of course these are just my thoughts... Not defending anyone in here at all.

can you make any suggestions on which to strip and how to do it, the last thing i want to do is to throw money at a developer.

Well to be honest i don't think its something you can do as well as stripping all those codes will mean maybe joomla and this template is not the right option for your usage as well as gains will not be spectacular. Stripping module checks would mean blocks will be visible, layouts getting changed even if you don't have any modules published in those positions.

So i suggest you use css compression and use less modules in frontpage or move to a better host.

norman there is nothing wrong with the host, i have never had any problems with them on other templates, the problems are down to the world news 2 template. ok the demo seems not to bad but as soon as you make it live that is where the problems happen. I am on a dedicated server and i also run over 70 sites which are fast but this template is slow

Hi,

If you are on a dedicated server do you use APC or Joomla cache? I run APC (latest version) and this makes quite some difference...On a Gavick quickstart install of TWN II I get between 6.5 and 7.5 first load and 4.5 repeat load...I take no real notice of Pagespeed / Yslow comparisons and just look for the first load / repeat as at the end of the day this is all it really boils down to...

www.webpagetest.org and www.gtmetrix.com

APC info..

http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/574

Dave

can you test my site and let me know what i get which is www.in2town.co.uk and should i speak to my hosting company about this and see what they are running

If you check the below test results from the two different testing sites, the page load is pretty good on both

http://www.webpagetest.org/result/11111 ... 1/details/

http://gtmetrix.com/reports/www.in2town.co.uk/brbO4hMw


To check if you have APC installed can be done by checking the Cache Settings in Joomla. If you have APC in the drop down it is installed in PHP. The other way of checking to look in to PHP info page

http://www.YOURSITE.com/administrator/i ... ew=sysinfo

look for APC...

Dave

Hi my hosting company have just added apc on the site and i have done a test and got the following results which are slower than the one that you have done, here is the results

http://www.webpagetest.org/result/111111_VM_257RP/

the hosting company also gave me the following report

I will kindly recommend you to review the following reports with an experienced web developer:

Grades

Type Your Value Recomnded Value Grade
HTML Size 11kb 40kb
Pass
Total Size 614kb 100kb
Fail
Total Requests 169 30
Fail
Generation Time 2.02783 1 second
Fail
Number Of Hosts 1 2
Pass
Number Of Images 164 25
Fail
Size Of Images 507kb 20kb
Fail
Number Of CSS Files 2 2
Pass
Size Of CSS Files 25kb 10kb
Fail
Number Of Script Files 2 2
Pass
Size Of Script Files 71kb 10kb
Fail
HTML Encoding Gzip Gzip
Pass
Valid Html Errors Valid
Fail
Frames 0 0
Pass

You can generate such report via :

http://www.joomlaperformance.com/component/option,com_performance/Itemid,52/

Please note that all "fail" results are not server related but specific to your website content

Hi,

The tests you have done using IE7...This is always slow. The defacto standard for tests is normally IE8 theses days..I am also based in London however I always use the Dulles (USA) testing node as has more functionality..

Dulles (USA) http://www.webpagetest.org/result/111111_GW_25843/ - IE8


London - http://www.webpagetest.org/result/111111_CW_25854/ - IE8

the joomlaperfomance site is quite old now and those fails are based on its own critera....Yslow and Pagespeed also have there own criteria however when you check these on www.gtmetrix.com your site comes up really well

http://gtmetrix.com/reports/www.in2town.co.uk/a14AwfpQ

Personally I dont think you have any real issues unless you use IE6 or IE7 for browsing...I have written these off and looking at Google Analytics on my site so has most of the Internet..

Dave

Thanks for the help. The reason why i am worried about the speed is that i have experienced high bounce rate which i have been told is down to the slow speed of the site, so i am trying to get it as fast as i can. did you find from yslow that it was saying the template needs a lot of work done on it.

Thanks for the help. The reason why i am worried about the speed is that i have experienced high bounce rate which i have been told is down to the slow speed of the site, so i am trying to get it as fast as i can. did you find from yslow that it was saying the template needs a lot of work done on it.

How high is the bounce rate....50% is pretty average.....Are you using compression on your site..Your source looks like you have combined all JS and CSS...

Dave

hi bounce rate is 62.17%

can you explain more on this please

Are you using compression on your site..Your source looks like you have combined all JS and CSS...

not sure how to check if the site in compression or how i would do this