My Site is Loading Slowly

Suggested actions to help speed up your website’s load time:

1) HOSTING ISSUES? If your site is loading slowly, it may be also be your hosting company or your internet connection. You’ll know it’s your internet connection because other web pages will load slowly. If you use shared hosting (any hosting plan that is $10 or less), recognize that your site speed depends on what other websites share your server, and your website speed will vary depending on the traffic/bandwidth used by other websites on the same sever. Finally, many of the users who are experiencing a slow load time are using servers/hosting companies that are not recommended by WordPress.org. These server hosts are recommended because WordPress performs at its best on these servers. Speed of your site will also vary with the traffic and quality of your local internet connection. There’s not much you can do about this.

Check out our list of recommended hosting:

The Best Web Hosting for Photographers and WordPress
Advanced Web Hosting for Photographers That Need Expansion

2) WORDPRESS ISSUES. There are a number of general WordPress maintenance steps you can take to dramatically speed up any WordPress site, including those using Photocrati.

• OPTIMIZE DATABASE By default, WordPress saves every revision you make to every page and post on your site. If you have a lot of page or posts, or you update them frequently, these can add up, and you can dramatically improve speed by deleting them. To do this, install and run the WP-Optimize plugin. Go to Plugins > Add New. Search for the plugin name, click Install and Activate. Then go to the plugin page in your WP admin area and run the plugin to optimize your database and remove page revisions.
• REMOVE UNUSED PLUGINS. If you have any unused plugins that have been deactivated – delete these plugins and make sure they are completely removed from your server (wp-content/plugins directory).

3) PHOTOCRATI THEME ISSUES. There are a few specific things you can do with our themes to speed them up as well.

• DISABLE DYNAMIC STYLE SHEET. If you want your site to load even faster, turn off the dynamic stylesheet. Go to THEME OPTIONS > OTHER OPTIONS. All the customization options built into our theme are incorporated into a dynamic style sheet that determines how your site looks. Each time you turn this off, our system will generate a static style sheet based on your current settings. This static sheet will allow your site to load faster, but it also means you cannot make customizations using our options panel. If you would like to make changes to your site, you should do the following:

1. Turn the dynamic style sheet back on.
2. Make changes using our options panel.
3. When finished, save your settings as a new custom theme so you can always return these settings later if lost. This is always a good ida. Just go to THEME OPTIONS > CHOOSE THEME and save a new custom theme.
4. Finally, disable the dynamic style sheet again by going to THEME OPTIONS > OTHER OPTIONS. When you disable the style sheet, our system will generate a new static style sheet based on your most current settings. This will replace your existing static style sheet

• CHOOSE FASTER IMAGE DISPLAY. Go to THEME OPTIONS > GALLERY SETTINGS. Under the “Image Resolution” option, try selecting “Resized Images” rather than “Full Resolution.” If you choose this option, our system will automatically resize your images for optimum web display. Please not that depending on your images, there may be some slight loss of image quality. If so, you can always return to the “Full Resolution” option.

4) YOUR OWN IMAGES. Finally but certainly not least, recognize that for photographers, the sizing of images you upload is one of the most critical factors. We regularly see people upload full res images. And even when “sizing for web” many photographer upload images that 1-2MB in size. Remember that if you have a gallery with 50 images and each one is 1MB, that’s 50MB of downloading for each visitor viewing the gallery. That’s a lot! Resize your images before uploading into galleries, to between 800px and 960px in the longest dimension. Well sized images are generally less than 500K in size.