Membership Plugin Doesn't Allow Caching, Speed Thoughts?

I’m running the MemberMouse plugin as part of a specific WordPress course theme called Course Cats. MM recommends I don’t use caching, since it messes with the plugin’s ability to do its business.

But, my sales page is returning some horribly slow numbers and I’m not sure what to do. I’m planning on upgrading the hosting to a better server, but I’ve got a few days until that goes through.

In the meantime, I’ve tried caching (it did, in fact, break the plugin) and compressing the images (seemed to actually increase loading time) without much luck.

The load time is 19 seconds, first byte is 8.748s, start render is 11.292s.

The second request in the waterfall that seems to just be accessing the site takes SIX seconds. I have no idea what that’s all about. I am using an SSL, so I don’t know if it has something to do with that. Later on, there’s an additional request to the site that takes an additional 6.5 seconds. These seem like two of the big things to cut down, but I have no idea what’s causing those to be so slow.

Not sure if I’m allowed to share this, but here’s the WPT:
http://www.webpagetest.org/result/151022_NE_PAN/1/details/

I’d love some insight. Thanks!

Hi bryandavidcohen,

You are testing http://sellingforauthors.com/sales-page but the actual site address is https://www.sellingforauthors.com/sales-page/. So, there are 2 redirects: The first from the domain to the secure version of the domain; the second from the secure version of the domain to the secure version of the www. subdomain.

Here’s what happens when the actual site address is tested: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/151022_PD_Z9Q/1/details/

Still very poor and ripe for optimization but certainly better.

Be well,
AJ
Managing Partner
WpFASTER | WordPress Optimization

Ah, good point. Hey, at least it shaved a second off, right?

Ugh. Sanctuary!

lol no such thing, unfortunately. You have to get this taken care of or you absolutely will lose members (and therefore money).

Some pointers:
1.) No reason why appropriately configured browser caching can’t be implemented.
2.) (Probably) no reason why database and object caching cannot be implemented.
3.) Potentially no reason why Page Caching cannot be implemented: Look into ZenCache Pro.
4.) Minify and concatenate CSS, JavaScript and HTML.
5.) Defer the parsing of all JavaScript that can be deferred/asynchronously loaded without ‘breaking’ the website.
6.) No reason why a CDN cannot be implemented (and probably no reason why the entire HTML response of the homepage cannot be cached at the edge).

Right. So it looks like you’ve got some homework! :wink:

Be well,
AJ
Managing Partner
WpFASTER | WordPress Optimization

Thanks for the tips!

Appropriately configured is definitely the right term. Tried to set up the minimum caching and CDN settings (through W3 and Cloudflare) and it broke several of my pages inside the course.

Is there a way to implement all this stuff just on the one page? I don’t think the plugin actually does all that much on the sales page, so if I could just do all this stuff on the one page without affecting the rest of the site, I might be safe.

Any ideas of how to do that (or who I can compensate to walk me through it :)). Thanks again.