darichardson

Your CSS is broken for some reason.

Did you install or update a plugin recently? Did you update WordPress recently? These are the most likely causes.

Also, check your folder to make sure /wp-content/themes/twentyeleven/style.css still exists.

Click, try removing the .htaccess file from the new site folder (back it up though) and see if you can access it then. I have a similar set up with a test site in a subfolder and I don’t have a .htaccess file in there and it works fine.

You may still need to put one back in there later, but this could help in figuring out the problem.

And just to be clear, your file structure is:

/root <– this is where your WP multisite is
/root/second <– this is where your new WP site is

Right?

Corey, I’m not really much of a PHP developer, but you’ll probably need to use some built-in WordPress hooks like is_frontpage().

Maybe something like:

global $blog_id;
if( is_frontpage() && ($blog_id == 2) ) {
//insert special CSS/HTML here
}
else {
//insert CSS/HTML for regular pages here
}

Someone else can probably take that code a little further, but that’s the gist. You would change the number of after blog_id == to whatever it should be. This would need to go somewhere in the template that you are using.

I’ve done a bit more work, and I’ve gotten the front-end to what I consider acceptable levels. The backend still feels a little sluggish. I still think this might be a redirecting issue that that needs to be taken care of server-wise, as you mentioned Ipstenu, but I’ll leave this open for just a bit longer until I know for sure.

There was one issue with my multi-site configuration that I found the previous web developer had somehow missed. In wp-config.php, I was missing

define('MUTLISITE', true );
define('SUBDOMAIN_INSTALL', false );

The rest of the multisite code generated was there. I don’t know how much a difference that actually makes, but it SEEMS like it would probably be important. I’ve added it (though it doesn’t seem to have affected speed on either the backend or frontend, and all of my sites were already accessible).

Also noticed that Minify needs to be activated on each individual site, as network activation did not work for me (though, I guess it could have been because of the missing code from wp-config.php that made that happen).

I also deleted a lot of unused plugins and updated a bunch of them, too. Again, didn’t notice an immediate difference after doing this but everything is getting very close to the “acceptable speed” range for me.

I’ll continue to update this thread in case someone else has similar issues in the future.

I did have the most recent version of WordPress (3.2.1.) and Super Cache.

However, it looks like the problem might have been my multisite setup. I was not the original one who set it up, and I was missing two lines from wp-config.php.

define('MUTLISITE', true );
define('SUBDOMAIN_INSTALL', false );

I also noticed that Minify was not working on each site, as it seems a network activate of that plugin does NOT actually activate it on other sites. You must manually go in to each site and activate those settings. Not related necessarily to Super Cache but thought it might be helpful to someone down the road.

Preloading on any Super Cache settings page for any site now seems to preload for every site, which is what I needed.

Great plugin!

The backend is a bit slow as well, and it does the same thing. I’ve now gone through and deleted many unused plugins, but I’m not completely discounting that it could be one. In any case, after tweaking caching and minifying some more, I’ve been able to get load times down to pretty acceptable levels, I think.

I’ll keep this open for a bit more, though, as I plan to tackle this some more next week.

Okay, I’m beginning to suspect that this might actually be a plugin after all, will keep this updated.

No idea, unfortunately.

It’s not that it’s loading individual elements slowly, it’s that it takes a long time before the page starts loading at all. Once the loading begins, it’s very fast (especially after enabling Supercache and Minify). It’s that initial delay or stutter that’s the problem.

Edit:

One addition. I should say that define('WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE', true); is NOT in my wp-config and in fact actually breaks the sites when added. This seems like odd behavior.

Edit2: Okay, never mind it appears adding the above does not break the site, but it also doesn’t change anything either.

After a little more testing, the stand-alone WordPress site doesn’t seem like it has this problem after all (or at least it’s much more minor). However, my htaccess file doesn’t seem right… could this be the problem?

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
  RewriteEngine on
#wordpress

  RewriteBase /

  #uploaded files
  RewriteRule ^(.*/)?files/$ index.php [L]
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !.*wp-content/plugins.*
  RewriteRule ^([_0-9a-zA-Z-]+/)?files/(.+) wp-includes/ms-files.php?file=$2 [L]

  # add a trailing slash to /wp-admin
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^.*/wp-admin$
  RewriteRule ^(.+)$ $1/ [R=301,L]

  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f [OR]
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
  RewriteRule . - [L]
  RewriteRule  ^([_0-9a-zA-Z-]+/)?(wp-.*) $2 [L]
  RewriteRule  ^([_0-9a-zA-Z-]+/)?(.*\.php)$ $2 [L]
  RewriteRule . index.php [L]
</IfModule>

Options +Indexes

I also just remembered that when the designer made this site, he created it so that we could switch back to our old Drupal site because at the time we still had content that we needed to refer to. Maybe he set something up so that we could switch between, but in the meantime managed to make the site slow?

Just some thoughts…

I should also say that I’ve got a regular ol’ HTML/PHP site (no CMS at all) that runs in a sub-directory just fine and doesn’t seem to be slow at all.

I’m not sure, to be honest.

Anyhow, I created a separate WordPress install at, you guessed it, cchs.ua.edu/alternate. It’s got the same issue. Takes a lot longer to load than, say, ua.edu which is also a WordPress site but one that has a lot of more content on it. It’s certainly faster than my main sites but I believe that’s only because it’s empty.

So where does that leave me? Does this sound like a server issue, then? What should I ask them to do if you think that might be it?

Thanks, Ipstenu. I kind of figured that out myself as well.

I’ll put up a single site and see what happens, but I will go ahead and say that there are a ton of other WordPress sites on the University’s servers and they all seem to run great.

I should add that I am on WordPress 3.2.1 and disabling plugins does not affect performance (well, you know, except the ones that actually HELP performance).

I also downloaded and properly installed the WordPress MU Domain Mapping plugin, but as I’m not using subdomains, this didn’t seem to be an issue. So maybe it’s not mapping that is the problem?