Remarkable Improvement

  • jpardstrum

    (@jpardstrum)


    5 months ago

    I had been struggling with slow load times during development of a new site. Several caching and optimization plugins were tried, but they gave only marginal improvements. Some even crashed a simple, fresh build with only a few Woocommerce products loaded. Boost installed easily and made immediate improvements.

    Before loading Boost from the Jetpack suite, I was at a point where I was resigned to a costly upgrade of a server and spending several hundred dollars more on software upgrades, but Boost did the trick. Jetpack will actually save us money in the long run by having several apps under one roof and allowing me to discontinue a few other paid licenses when they run out.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Leah

    (@lerrtle)

    Hey @jpardstrum,

    Thanks for the 5-star review and for taking the time to share your experience using Jetpack Boost.

    Our goal is give your site the same performance advantages as the world’s leading websites, no developer?required. I’m happy to hear that you found Boost effective, affordable, and easy-to-use.

    Best wishes.

    Thread Starter jpardstrum

    (@jpardstrum)

    Thanks Leah, but I think my joy was premature.

    Yesterday while continuing to build the site, everything was fine for about an hour until the platform once again started to slow down. Elementor refused to load properly, and Boost seemed to forget some of the icons, CSS and javascript entirely when rendering the front end pages. Pages took up to two minutes to fully load and were still missing important elements, and the back end was so slow it was entirely unusable. With Elementor not responding, I couldn’t even access the most critical pages to correct them after things like widgets, contact forms and newsletter sign-ups started to malfunction. Adding new products (artworks in our case) was impossibly slow.

    I reverted to a backup, disabled everything I could short of rendering the theme/template useless, and will try to rebuild again at a snail’s pace.

    The problem is I’m now in the endless loop of blame-passing where WordPress blames it on the host server, the host server blames it on the caching systems, the theme writers (Opal-Postero) blame it on plug-ins (all of which THEY actually recommended), and Elementor blames everything on anybody but themselves. Clearly there’s a conflict, but no errors are being thrown. It just slows to a crawl and dies.

    Jetpack and Boost have been disabled until I can get the system operating smoothly and correctly, albeit slowly. Luckily we don’t launch until late July.

    Certainly a rollercoaster of highs and lows in the WordPress sphere. We went from disappointment to euphoria to frustration in a span of less than 6 hours!

    Cheers,
    JP

    Leah

    (@lerrtle)

    Hi JP,

    Sorry to hear that you’re running into so many roadblocks. That definitely sounds frustrating and I can imagine I’d be feeling the same way in your shoes.

    It sounds like you’re well on your way toward a solution, and I’ve rounded up some troubleshooting documents that might also be helpful. I know you said there aren’t any specific errors being thrown right now, but we have specific help guides on errors within the Boost Critical CSS and Boost caching features:

    Troubleshooting Jetpack Boost Critical CSS?issues

    Troubleshooting Jetpack Boost caching?issues

    We also have guide that identifies plugins, themes, and hosting features are known to conflict with some of Jetpack’s functionality, and our suggested workarounds:

    Known issues

    Wishing you the best. If there’s anything else we can help with, reach out anytime.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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