Several people have told me that my blog is taking way too long to load since I switched themes. I’ve tried to isolate the culprit by deactivating various plug-ins and widgets, but the problem continues to elude me.
I have a couple of other things I can try, but I won’t have time to get to that before the weekend. So, in the meantime, I’ve reverted to my familiar old theme, which doesn’t have as many bells and whistles, and which can’t take advantage of all the features and functionality of WordPress 2.7. But my heart went pitter-patter when the site loaded and the three big familiar sheep peered down on me. I hope yours does too. Those sheep were never meant to fit inside a 200 pixel high banner. They were meant to be big. And now they are.
Speaking of hearts going pitter-patter, I was working my shift at the Shepherds of Good Hope tonight, and one of the clients found a slice of pineapple at the bottom of a pitcher of juice. Her whole face lit up. “Oh my God!” she exclaimed, “A pineapple! Can you believe it? I am so lucky!”
I was so happy for her. Not just because she got a treat, but because she has that rare capacity to find joy in small things, which must come in handy when life’s circumstances are such that you’re eating at the soup kitchen. (Although I have to say, I’m constantly surprised by how many of the clients at Shepherds are smiling and upbeat.)
I saw Dave X at Shepherds tonight too: we argued about politics. For a homeless guy, he’s weirdly conservative. Good old Dave X – it was good to see him again.
Well, my heart went pitter-patter, too, cuz I love the sheep. The bigger the better.
I like it better. We don’t need no bells & whistles.
Meg hjertet gikk pitter-mønster, også, fordi JEG elske sauen. Det betydeligere det bedre.
Og JEG elske Beyonce. Hvor mange kattene elske Beyonce?
@ robin:
I respectfully disagree. There’s nothing bell and whistley about upgrading a theme that has a fair # of incompatibilities in it.
I don’t think it has anything to do with the theme, personally.. but either the host server not being up to snuff.. or a plugin that’s slowing it down.On the other hand.. if this theme is using the exact same plugins as the revised theme did, and it isn’t slowing down, then maybe it really was the particular theme Zoom picked out.. but I’d find that rather odd.
Akshully, the old one loads more slowly for me than the new one did. It took ages to get here (had to come in and look at the sheep in their former glory you know).
Poor Duncan, upstaged by sheep. Don’t tell him, he’ll he heartbroken.
I like the sheep this way… and I, too, was having problems with the download to a point where I would not come and “visit” if I was in a hurry….
I was finding it slow and love the fact that I didn’t have to wait 15 seconds today to scroll down.
I don’t find it slow in either format. I LIKE the freshness of the new banner and the 3-column format. The random post generator is a nice feature too but that may be why the page is slow to load for others.
…although ready to embrace change, I still find comfort in the old page layout. Either way it’s the content and the personality of the blog that brings us all back. Love GC.
I see you are already using WP-Super-Cache…
Usually, it is calls to the MySQL database that slow down WordPress. Hopefully, you will be able to track down which element of the new theme was doing so excessively.
I found it crazy slow with the new theme… Three minutes to load the page each time!
I have a thought though… Blogs that have added Delicious to them take ten million year to load for me. I don’t know why, but maybe that has something to do with it?
OMG – who doesn’t love those big fat sheep. pitter patter pat pat pat. they’re my second very favourite kind of animal, especially the big fat variety.
I hope Duncan isn’t too upset by being ‘demoted’. Must say that I am quite glad you have gone back to the old theme, I have a rural (back of beyond) pay-as-you-go connection (max download is 44kbps) and it was timing out before everything was loaded.
I’m so glad you all told me the site was too slow instead of just suffering in silence, or worse yet, drifting away.
On the weekend I’ll spend some more time trying to get to the root of the problem. But until then, I’ll leave the old theme up.
It’s interesting though that not everybody’s experiencing the same thing in terms of speed issues. I wonder if it has anything to do with the browsers being used?
Good point… I’m using Firefox 3.0.5 on a PC running Windows XP… using Rogers high speed.
My guess is that the site loads decently when few people are visiting, but starts to stutter at busy times.
Usually, the way to deal with that is to cut out or speed up whatever is causing the bottleneck.
This Firefox extension may help you diagnose the problem:
http://getfirebug.com/
I wasn’t having any speed issues, but much like GC, firefox, high speed, and a newish computer make for good browsing conditions
Ack! The return of the pop-out ‘share’ button…
I am glad I am in good company with Dave X, being weirdly conservative.
The pineapple . . . made me cry. In the good, good way. And I’m so happy to see the ears with the correct faces. And sheep and things.