Hello!
We’ve been long-term users of X-Store and over the holiday period needed to update the theme and core plugin, as it was well out of date. Upgrading from Version 4.x of the theme to the latest version, 7.x)
The WordPress site is around five years old, has a large amount of orders (4882) and a reasonable amount of mixed single/variation products (436 not including variations). This shouldn’t be an issue, as it’s had that number of items for a long time, prior to the issues.
The hanging points are any page with product information (prior to caching of course), so WooCommerce listing pages and individual product.
Our page load times are anywhere from 8 – 20 seconds depending on the page.
When switching to Storefront theme, the site loads at a much more acceptable speed, hence, along with the other items we’ve tried below, I’m led to believe the theme is the sticking point.
I’ve added some page metrics results in the sensitive data section, but your best example is to browse the shop area of the staging site provided.
Server specifications are good enough for a site of this size:
– Physical memory: 8GB (PHP & WP memory limits set to reflect this)
– Processor: 8 CPU, 200EP
– PHP 7.3 (latest non-site-breaking version)
Recently we’ve tried the following, with no improvements in speed:
– Changing individual settings within the Theme customizer.
– Updating the PHP version.
– Using Smush Pro to resize and crunch *all* images.
– Set the PHP memory limit and WP memory limit to 8GB (max on current host)
– Removing all child theme code and reinstating it bit by bit.
– Removing all plugins, then reinstating them one by one.
– Sanitizing database manually, removing old posts, meta and other bulky items, including old plugin/theme options and values.
– Using DB Optimizer to clear transients, sessions, recount terms and other maintenance tasks.
– Switched all tables from MyISAM to InnoDB for the database type.
– Implementing caching (W3 Total Cache and LiteSpeed Cache on LiteSpeed server). There’s an improvement on cached pages obviously, but initial load is still ridiculously long.
– Manually Consolidating theme and plugin CSS from third-party plugins to reduce scripts. Consolidated CSS tags removed using a third-party plugin.
– Deferring theme and third party JS using a third-party plugin (causes all kinds of problems!)
– Serving pages with Gzip on the server.
At this point I’m confident that the theme is the issue, especially after moving to Storefront and seeing much better performance. We don’t really want to move away from X-Theme, as the site looks great, but there is a fundamental speed issue somewhere that means our site is no longer comfortably browsable and we’re noticeably losing orders and getting negative customer feedback as a result.