Hi Andrew, et. al:
I just activated the DNS to the final host on a development site in process; and, moved it from the development hosting subdomain (http://www.tomgoetschius.dreamhosters.com) to the main domain (http://www.tomgoetschius.com) . In general, everything wen’t along fine. I used Velvet Blues to update the urls in the links, and that partially worked. I had to update all of the links within PageBuilder widgets manually. That’s almost all done, with few or no issues. It would have been nice for Velvet Blues to have been able to get into the Pagebuilder rows and settings. But, nothing really major.
I’ve got two big issues in getting this ready for delivery:
1) The development site, set up with a Vantage Premium Child Theme, on BOXED LAYOUT, seems to be stuck on FIXED WIDTH. I’ve tried every setting I know of to get it back. I’m in the process of deactivating everything to see if there is any conflict there. I need some help getting the layout back.
One thing about it was that most of the rows in the layout are set to FULL WIDTH STRETCHED, to enable some of the layout functions to place things where I wanted them. But, on the development site, that made no difference, as those rows stretched full width within the BOX.
What do I need to do to get this back to BOXED Layout? (I’ll be trying a few more things while waiting your reply).
2) LOAD SPEED: Everything is running very slowly. I have graphics on pages, but their weight is not substantial. All have been optimized down pretty. Dreamhost says I need to set up a caching plugin, but will not recommend one. What is the easiest, and fastest one to use? Are there other tricks I can use to reduce the load of all the PageBuilder rows and widgets. The admin is running like glue, and the load times are horrendous.
Could use some help on this.
Thanks,
HG
I figured out #1: It was my screen view doing it. I had it magnified. What a maroon!
How about Speed guys. I need help…
Hi HG
WP Super Cache or W3 Total Cache are the two big popular plugins for caching and will definitely make a difference. As you run through the setup options just keep in mind that most themes / plugins / sliders tend to break at some point when using CSS and JS minfication. So by all means, try a setting out, but if you see a problem, roll back the setting you’ve just used. Most of these plugins have an easy setup option that is usually pretty safe. Also, keep your caching plugin in mind when making changes. Often users aren’t sure why changes don’t reflect on a live site, caching plugins are usually the challenge.
There is a lot of info out there on this category of plugins. If you want to research more you could start with a post like this:
http://wpdevshed.com/best-wordpress-cache-plugin/
Andrew. Thanks.
I installed Wordfence for security. It has a caching feature as well. I activated it, and haven’t seen any problems yet. I have no idea how it stacks up against the others. What do you know about it?
HG/mws
I’ve only ever used the security features in WordFence. The basics of performance are well known so if WordFence has this feature I’m sure it’ll help.