TOR Fashion – Site Performance

This post is for Ivor, who sent the following in a contact form, but didn’t bother to provide a valid email so I could respond.

Why this site is soooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo laggy?!!!!
Often it’s alive only because Cloudflare’s “Always Online” with search returning 502 errors!
…could you fix this?

There are a number of reasons why the site is slow:

1. There are 169,000+ images. I have gone through and  optimized most of them, but the site is not designed to do that when people upload images through the form. This is because it would cost an enormous amount of money to pay a third party to do it and would slow the form down to unusability (trust me, I’ve tried). I don’t always find the time every month to optimize all the images and am several months behind. NOTE: When I do this, it also slows the site down to unusability until I am finished.
2. The outdated code I use to display multiple posts at once (think Similarity and Prolific Posters) was never designed to group hundreds of posts per page. Having that many images on one post / page slows the site down considerably. Having multiple people hit posts / pages with that many images at the same time magnifies this.
3. When I started, in my ignorance instead of creating custom posts and categories,  I used the default ones. This forces the site to search through the same table every time someone does anything on the site. Once again, multiple users makes this worse.
4. All MMO Fashion sites are on the same server. Multiple people doing things on one site that causes it to slow down affects all the sites. TOR Fashion is worse because it was the first site, has more images, and has the most mistakes.

I was able to mitigate a lot of these problems on ESO Fashion, which has more traffic, by creating a second site without the outdated code and using custom posts and categories. So far, I’ve been working on it for over a year and a half and am not done transferring everything over. It was fairly simple to get rid of the pages with the outdated code and direct them to the new site because I never did the Similarity section like on TOR Fashion.

It would be be nearly impossible to do the same thing on TOR Fashion because nearly every post has a Similarity section (which you may have noticed I have been neglecting to update on newer posts). I would have to go into every single post (13,800+) and most pages (210) on the site and delete that code manually. This would take me years.

The only thing I could do is create a new site from scratch. This would also take me years and I just don’t have the time or inclination to do it. I’ve done what I can to optimize the site and it has helped a bit. I just can’t think of anything else I could do that wouldn’t take me years and force me to create a new site.