tuccimane

@ausworkshop – you should note that when I made this post I was having a bad day and couldn’t use my own brain so I was getting help on how to edit the homepage for a particular theme that I’d never dealt with.

For your situation though, you should understand, and many business owners should understand, that websites are a trade-off.

You can have many things, but I’ll name a few major things:
– Design
– Optimization
– Difficulty to Edit

Bad/Okay Design with Bad/Okay Optimization can be achieved 1000000 ways while still keeping the difficulty to edit at EASY.

You could also have Good Design OR Good Optimization and EASY difficulty to edit, which is what most site owners and business owners go for, since they like you are adamant about being able to edit their site.

Then there is the obvious, which is that you can have Great Design and Great Optimization, but then you have a site that is also very HARD to edit without good coding knowledge.

You see what I’m getting at here??

Websites are a product of an industry that involves a general skill-trade (web design/development and coding skills), and just like say – the Mechanic industry – you can’t expect to be able to fix everything in your car or truck when you buy it.

Sure if you do a little learning, you can DIY an oil change, or even something more complicated like a radiator replacement. But ultimately, when something more advanced needs to be tended to, you need to call a professional.

It’s the same thing with websites. You can’t expect at ALL to be able to control a website if you don’t know the first thing about web development and coding.

There are some people who buy a car and plan to do some minor maintenance of their own, but in reality- the majority of people buy a car knowing that they cannot control anything in regards to it’s maintenance and they are at the mercy of a trade-pro for that aspect.

Websites are the same way. The majority of people just get a website knowing they won’t be able to control any of the inner workings. They will just own the site as an entity, but it’s livelihood is at the mercy of trade-professionals once it is created.

Now like I said, some people DIY minor things that trade-pros handle, and the same can be done for websites, but you cannot EXPECT without prior negotiation for a web company to think that you aren’t like the MAJORITY who just purchase a website knowing they will need the company still for updates and maintenance.

You think every car salesman expects their customers to be in the minority that does DIY auto maintenance? No way! They sell each customer those cars thinking that those people will never open the hood themselves, because that describes the majority! Unless you say, “listen, I’m looking for a vehicle that maybe is a little modern inside in that I will be able to change the water pump, perhaps the alternator, and a few other things with relative ease since I know a thing or two – but not everything”.

What I’m saying I guess is that it just sounds to me like you didn’t consider any of this before getting your site, which I don’t blame you because owning a business has so many facets that going into each one with all the details and your head on straight is nearly impossible.

Whoever your web people were though, I doubt they meant to toy you around, they were probably just thinking you were an average site owner and understood that their role in your site would be more than just the creation. I’ve found this a lot though in my own experience: as the web professional, they should’ve double checked your true needs before contracting anything with you. The fault goes both ways is what I’m saying.

They should have checked to see if you wanted something in a more user-friendly CMS (WordPress is said to be user-friendly, but let’s be honest, at the end of the day – it’s got more potential for advanced users than beginners and is therefore a complex CMS, not a simple CMS).

Honestly sounds like you need SquareSpace or Wix, but I have to warn you again about what I was saying before…you will be making a sacrifice. SS and Wix don’t have as great of SEO capability (hell Wix you can’t even embed code without it being in <div> tags in an <iframe>…i.e. say goodbye to any schema markups). But that is the trade-off. You get EASY editing, but it lowers your maximum potential optimization, but you still keep decent design.

Ultimately though, if you want something that is SLEEK, and FULLY OPTIMIZED (and continually optimized…) then you would need a web agency of some sort to not only create, but also manage your site monthly. A truly great website is an ongoing investment. Bad to Okay sites are more of a fixed cost though as they get created and then the maintenance and management is done by the business themselves and nothing technical ever gets done with the site again until perhaps a future redesign.

Hope this all calms you down a little. I think some people jump into website ownership too quickly and just think it’s all the same. It’s very different based on your needs and wants though and until you understand that having stuff like what happened with you and your web people can be pretty overwhelming and frankly hard to understand why they would even seemingly screw you like that to begin with. After reading this though, which I hope you did, I think it will enlighten you a little and you will be ready to really decide what it is you want and know what that does or doesn’t entail in regards to what the web company you work with will create.

For anyone who sees this…

Leveraging Browser Caching can be done very easily by just adding a block (see mojamba’s response above) to your htaccess. The devs are responding or caring much because the ease of adding it yourself is ridiculously simple.

As a side note: I also see people complaining about not all things being leveraged, but you need to understand that you can only leverage browser caching for files located on your own server. Therefore, if your page or site calls a script that uses an off-server resource, and the resource it’s calling isn’t being leveraged by where it’s coming from, then you can’t change that.

A good example of this is actually a lot of Google’s script sources, which I find INCREDIBLY frustrating. I don’t even add analytics or certain things like that anymore because of their lack of regard for extending the cache on their resources. So ironic too when you think about it. To have 100/100 pagespeed scores, and then it becomes 99/100 because you get dinged one point after adding something that calls an unleveraged resource straight from the internet gods themselves (Google).

Agree with deviceguru.

Disable Yoast’s XML Sitemap function, and just upload one directly through ftp to your root after generating it using something like https://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

Making your own HTML sitemap is extremely easy, and generating an XML sitemap is even easier.

I always disable Yoast’s XML sitemap option because of just how easy it is to generate your own and upload it.

I’ll just say outright that I attempted for the longest time to set up a site that was under /blog but I wanted it served as just /.

I nearly had it working, but ultimately the best thing I ever did was get the All in One WP Migration plugin, change all “/blog/” strings to “/” when using the export function, and then following the extremely easy instructions on this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yat8HfpY1eM).

More or less, you create an entirely new database on the front end of your site. And then import your file from your “/whatever/” to just “/” backup that you made using the plugin. Set up permalinks, login using your /whatever/ login info and viola. You have it all on the front end and need not worry anymore about trying to get caching plugins to work with your site while trying to push /whatever/ to the root to be served there without actually moving it there.

TLDR: move your WP to the front end because it’s just an incredible hassle otherwise. Doing so seems risky and arduous, but All in One WP Migration plugin makes it extremely easy if you just export your database from the plugin while changing all your /whatever/ strings to just /

Frank,

How do I buy you a drink through this damn thing?

I just trashed all the suspect options and it was literally 51% of my database. Unreal. I hope this clears up a lot of problems. We’ll see.

Again, the level of commitment to support here is nothing short of impressive.

James,

Perfect.

Thank you.

Not sure why though I was seeing something like “using 90% object cache” or some other when I was running Query Monitor.

I do use WP Super Cache which uses WP_CACHE and drops in advanced-cache.php but that’s different from the object cache I know.

It was WP Clean Up Optimizer that I had used a while back.

Do you think because this is an option to pull another admin-ajax that finally removing it may reduce some load on my admin? I’ve been doing tons lately to try and resolve a slow admin loading and recently a lot of it has to do with minimizing the amount of calls to admin-ajax because of how it requires a lot from the server.

I’ll mark this as resolved now though, you gave me my answer, thank you!

Eli,

Thanks again for the info.

I did manage to bump up my server memory_limit value, didn’t help too too much, but it will at some point I bet. I also went ahead and downloaded the HeartBeat Control plugin in case that’s an issue. I cleaned up my wp_options like crazy and all tables for that matter really. And I managed to trash some cron tasks from plugins that I deleted ages ago after cleaning the wp_options.

Hopefully things come around here.

I just want to comment on your devotion to your project. I see you all over your forum, and all over the support here. There aren’t too many authors with that type of direct support and dedication to their craft. I can say for sure though, that every author like that that does exist – I own their plugin and use it regularly.

Eli,

Any chance you could help me or direct me on how to set up a an error log?

I go into my cPanel on GoDaddy (the issue with this server is a) it is GoDaddy, b) it isn’t even GoDaddy it’s a GoDaddy affiliate who uses GoDaddy servers…)

I go to my File Manager and I have Access Logs I can look at, but under the error logs there are no existing files.

That means I need to set up an error log to even begin looking at such things yes?

Also these errors may or may not have occurred because I tried to open the firewall settings in a separate tab while running my scan and crashed into a 500 error (probably was already at 80% CPU with your scan going) but your amazing plugin kept running in my other tab anyway. Maybe it was scanning to no avail briefly and then when the CPU load dropped and 500 error went away it was scanning properly again? I have no idea.

I just figured out that since I can’t change GoDaddy’s php5.ini, I can drop one in my root using the cPanel. Maybe because they had me set to 64M the CPU Load was coming in very high, because I was running Server Stats plugin for a bit and saw that my normal memory usage was ~45M. It would say I was using a small % of my 256M set for WordPress, but none of that matters if the server is capped at 64M yes?

I dunno, just trying to figure all this out. I’ve had problems since the beginning, and I am just a developer, not the site owner. I work for an agency and advised the client to upgrade his hosting before or at least go directly though GoDaddy and not some GoDaddy middle-man. His response? “Our internet here is 5MB download and 3MB upload”.

I.e., the guy is totally out of touch with the whole deal. He gave me his ISP IT guy’s phone number. I had to track down his hosting company myself and get them to call him to give me access so I could even install the database. Then I told him to change his hosting when I started to experience some seriously slow load times after the fresh install.

He claimed to have dealt with it and I was seeing he was on GoDaddy hosting, and things got faster, but it was just a fluke I think because I went back and I still have access to his old hosting and it’s still his current host.

I’m rambling now. Thank you for your help. Hopefully I can figure this all out eventually.

I marked this as resolved so you guys don’t have to keep telling people to make their own thread.

@slickpig,

just do a manual update using FTP.

Honestly, if they are all that particular file I would even try going into FTP and deleting it and uploading a new file from a fresh WP 4.5.3 download into its place.

To be safe though I suggest deleting ALL files EXCEPT: wp-config.php and wp-content folder and then reuploading all the root files you deleted (Don’t delete non wordpress things – i.e. I have a sitemap.xml, a robots.txt and one other file in my root that I keep).

After that, reupload the wp-admin folder you delete and the wp-includes folder you deleted. You will lose nothing this way.

Why do it like this? Root files => wp-admin => wp-includes instead of all at once?

Because sometimes FTP is slow at uploading and will break and give you a transfer incomplete error and you’ll just have to do it all over. I find piecing it into three uploads allows my FTP to never run into that type of situation.

Hey Frank,

I got back into my admin finally.

I had changed this piece of code in preparation for that, and after bouncing around a bit with Query Monitor on, I am no longer seeing those notices.

I don’t expect you to know, but maybe you can point me in the direction of a plugin you know works (an author friend perhaps? :p)…

After accessing myPHPadmin and removing TONS of old wp_options, wp_postmeta, etc AND noticing that my ‘home’ url ended with a ‘/’ (and removing it of course) that’s when I was able to access the admin without 500 errors again…

It was still very slow, but somewhat faster than before. I ended up uninstalling the Query Monitor because I wasn’t seeing anything too interesting anymore, but then I installed WP SERVER STATS.

And now I am seeing the issue I think… Anywhere from 60-90% CPU Load on average.

And when I’m watching the “real time” bar, it spikes randomly from sitting dormant at about 35% to up to 90% again, and that’s just sitting on the dashboard page after logging in.

Crazy stuff, not sure how this is happening but it explains a lot. Memory was never an issue, it’s been a CPU Load issue all along that’s just dragging the admin panel into the ground. Your plugin and Super Cache are keeping the front end of the site like lightning, but loading my own site pages while logged in is terrifyingly slow as well (Super Cache not loading cached pages for logged in users obviously so I’m getting the ‘real’ speed and CPU Load of things when I’m logged in).

Frank,

Sorry! Just thought I’d post them here for your use if they are meaningful.

I only read the log as “PHP Errors”

And then it listed “Php warnings” and “Php Notices”.

Having a ton of trouble right now accessing my admin (500 errors like crazy) and I saw that and didn’t attribute it to my issues but thought you would appreciate the info.

As a side note, your plugin + super cache has my actual site in a wonderful speedy zip land of fastness. As for the admin, well, hopefully it’s just something simple like PHP 5.3.x needs to be upgraded or something, because turning off theme and plugins isn’t even getting me in nowadays >.<

Yes. It’s a bit of a known bug from everything I discovered about it.

I’ll save you the same research.

There are three places this needs to be edited:

-/wp-contents/plugins/wp-super-cache/wp-cache.php

-/wp-contents/plugins/wp-super-cache/wp-cache-phase1.php (check ***phase2.php in the same location if I am mistaken about which file it was)

-/wp-contents/cache/.htaccess (reveal hidden files in FTP option if you can’t see the .htaccess)

Do a “find” command for “max-age” and you will find it in the .php files. Just change it to how many seconds you wanted. It doesn’t mess with actual plugin garbage collection on expired cache files but it is being submitted as 3 seconds for your headers because you can check your Site.com line in the Pingdom Speed Test’s waterfall after it runs and it even shows that your sites cache files are being read as max-age=3.

NO IDEA why this is known for so long but still unchanged but whatever. Just make the changes and note the way you did it somewhere for when the plugin updates and replaces those files maybe. For that matter, I’ve had to change LOTS of things to get a clean function out of this plugin and I’m noting them all for that reason.

Bad_Egg,

I know this is way late. Although, about the time you posted I was installing this theme for a site and dealing with some header issues too and could’ve helped you if I was browsing here.

However, I just wanted to say that I think you will find overall that WordPress is for anything BUT beginners. Even on a paid theme that is “Wix” or “SquareSpace” or any other interface type “style” that makes you have to know very little code, you will find that ultimately you come up short.

For me, I realized this once I ended up making “responsive” css edits to make certain page elements block as intended when on mobile or tablet devices. Then came configuring optimizations using plugins and caching as well, which ended up with me making practically undocumented code edits in all sorts of places – so much so that I created a text document to record all the ridiculous tiny things that I have gone through changing in order to make everything actually work and not be terribly slow, or render incorrectly (like your header issue), etc etc.

Yet, this theme is meant for those true WP Beginners who read out there that WP is FOR beginners, and experts alike. HAH. Don’t fool yourself. You should hire a web maintenance/SEO agency immediately (ahem I am the executive at my agency…) because down the road you are going to realize that one way or another, being on wordpress as a beginner is a bad bad bad idea unless you are simply running a blog in the default theme and never doing anything even remotely special with your site.

If you are running a business though and need a proper site and aren’t willing to pay an agency to create and maintain it then WordPress is going to be hell.

I am an Web/SEO expert with all sorts of coding knowledge from responsive CSS, to java, to jquery, to php, etc etc etc. And I can adapt and learn anything code-wise because it’s something I love and understand, and I got to tell you – creating the site I just made on WordPress using this theme and making it truly “good” from the look, to the responsiveness, to the speed, to the SEO – doing everything I did up until now where I finally can say it’s finished…I’ve been tearing out my hair.

Now I can only imagine what it would be like for a true newbie. My oh my. This is only the second site ever I’ve dealt with in WordPress and I can say for sure, that if you want to do it right in every aspect – wordpress is for advanced users to experts and pros. It’s not even close to accessible for beginners. Not. Even. Close.

I’m just happy I was able to give my client what they wanted without going crazy and spending more than 3x the time I quoted them (which was already over-quoted by 3x because I am aware of cognitive heuristics and biases and know that saying 8hrs work always means at least 24hrs)>

James,

Thanks again. Also, I didn’t mean to warn people not to upgrade to 4.5.3 although I did explicitly say that above…

Let me rephrase:

For people with already fragile sites that are configured in oh so many different ways with coding tweaks you have implemented to both theme and plugins, etc. – please be wary that your site will not function on the fringe forever. Something, at some point will implode the whole thing, maybe even something like a simple update. So therefore, don’t stop working once you’ve reached a nice and usable state. I.e. do make sure to find stable solutions for the future after you have “fixed” things. You don’t want to run into trouble down the line and end up having to derive all the solutions you could be working on now but in a short period and under panic.