“Site-down” since activating this plugin

I develop the Display Widgets SEO Plus plugin https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/display-widgets-seo-plus/ that’s forked from this plugin.

I’ve read through a lot of the support threads for the Display Widgets plugin to find issues to fix in my version, and with most of the “Update Plugin” type support threads no usable information was supplied to indicate a specific issue: some users will see a plugin hasn’t been updated for over a year and assume it’s no longer compatible with the latest version of WordPress and won’t risk it.

The display widgets plugin and the new plugin both share the same basic code base, my new version has a lot of changes (fixed multiple issues), but is still the same core code. The code behind the plugins isn’t particularly complex which means it’s unlikely to break just because WordPress updates, there will be sites a few years from now still happily running v2.05 of this plugin (assuming it’s never updated again).

There’s nothing about the plugins that would inherently slow a site down a lot or take it down, if there was I wouldn’t use it: I’ve used the Display Widgets code for years on over 100 domains and performance SEO is a major factor (Google takes speed into account now) when I use a feature.

That being said most features added to a site have a performance cost, if your site has 10 widgets say and you’ve set Display Widgets options to them all that’s additional calls to your database to check those options. It’s a relatively small performance hit, but it is a cost you have to pay for a feature.

A handful of additional database queries won’t slow a site down to a noticeable degree, but if you have a lot of plugin/theme features running adding one more could be the straw that breaks the camels back. I checked the site out linked from your profile (the Ticket to Takeoff one) and it appears to use a lot of theme/plugin features some of which will have a significant performance impact.

Take a look at https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.tickettotakeoff.com%2F

Also check other services that check site loading speed like
https://www.webpagetest.org
https://tools.pingdom.com
https://gtmetrix.com

From Googles basic checks:

Eliminate render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content
Your page has 3 blocking script resources and 16 blocking CSS resources. This causes a delay in rendering your page.

That’s a LOT of additional CSS files added by plugins. All 19 JS/CSS files have to load before the users sees your content, if one timesout the page won’t load quickly.

BTW some of them don't load anything (same file loaded twice):
https://www.tickettotakeoff.com/wp-content/themes/photomania-pro-child/style.css?ver=4.7
https://www.tickettotakeoff.com/wp-content/themes/photomania-pro-child/style.css?ver=2.0.0

Looks like you have a poorly thought out theme adding custom CSS files that are blank (no CSS rules in them).

There’s also a bunch of non-render blocking scripts loaded in the footer as well (at least 15 js files).

That’s 30+ js/CSS files being loaded!!!

When I ran the test I got:

Reduce server response time
In our test, your server responded in 0.22 seconds.

So looks like the server is struggling to cope with your site.

Could be all the features (including the Display Widgets feature) added together (or one or two in particular) is taxing the server to a point it’s intermittently unreachable by the Jetpacks monitoring service (maybe when there’s a spike in real traffic). Or it could be something else like an oversold server (not suggesting that’s the case). Or having too many theme/plugin features and an oversold server or something else ??

I suggest going through your plugins and theme features and reducing them to only those you NEED. If a plugin is active you don’t use, deactivate it.

If your site is still going down after removing plugins you don’t need etc.., disable your plugins one by one, leave your site running for 24hrs to see if that plugin is the cause.

Good luck ??

David

Also take a read of https://jetpack.com/support/monitor/ in paticular:

We tentatively mark your site as down if the HTTP response code is 400 or greater, which indicates either a permissions error or a fatal code error is prohibiting your site from appearing to visitors, or we see more than 3 300-series redirects, suggesting a redirect loop, or if your site fails to respond within 20 seconds.

Note the “respond within 20 seconds”. So not actually down, but very slow to respond.

With all those js/CSS files I can see your site taking 20 seconds to respond at times of high traffic or when the server the sites on is taxed.

David

Hi @seo-dave,

Thanks for your thorough response! And apologies for the delay (catching up on the new year). I’ve answered your comments below:

– Speed test: I use Pingdom which returns much different results: https://tools.pingdom.com/#!/PGZ3T/www.tickettotakeoff.com
– Optimization: Site is optimized using W3 Total Cache, Cloudflare, compressed images, and standard maintenance.
– Number of plugins: 29 active; though most are administrative and not actually hogging bandwidth.
– Number of widgets utilizing Display Widgets plugin: 4 active; basic page bio, RSS, and two plain text/jpg.
– Load times during high traffic: Not a concern; site is new and collects low traffic for now.

In terms of overall use, the site is very basic in construction. Which is why I’m skeptical to contribute this to an overloaded server…

That said, I see your notes on JS/CSS. To be honest, this is a bit beyond my technical expertise. But a few notes:
– I’m in conversations with Jetpack/Siteground as well, who have made significant changes since the issue was first reported (~Dec-28), including increasing execution time. Unfortunately, the issue persists…
– Additionally (and if it means anything), the theme I purchased was produced by a reputable company responsible for 30 others in the WP marketplace. I’d be surprised to seem them distributing a janky theme to this large of an audience.

I hadn’t changed how I interacted/worked on this site when the issue started. The ONLY factor that was introduced during this time was this plugin.

Let me know if you have further ideas. Thanks again for your time!

Liz

I’m in the process of setting up a new VPS server (a cheap VPS from Godaddy: works out $200 a year, I’ll put 60+ domains on it), it’s more powerful than my other VPS servers (same company, this one has 4GB RAM, others are 3GB and 2GB), so everything should work better etc… These are NOT powerful servers, so performance is REALLY important to me so I don’t overload them.

Was happily moving domains across with no issues, when I moved a domain mapped WordPress site (domain mapped means you can run dozens of domain under one WordPress install) to the new server I couldn’t access some WordPress admin pages correctly which used javascript (widgets wouldn’t drag for example).

Setup a new sub-site (no content other than the Hello Post) for testing, deactivated most plugins (domain mapping plugin and W3Total cache was still active), switched to the default WordPress theme and it still didn’t work. Under FireFox development console (CTRL SHIFT J) I was getting a not loading error for the WordPress javascript files:

Failed to fetch ....../wp-admin/load-scripts.php?c=1&load%5B%5D=jquery-core,jquery-migrate,utils&ver=4.7. Code 2152398924.  DevToolsUtils.js:442
Error: Error loading this URL: Could not load the source for ....../wp-admin/load-scripts.php?c=1&load%5B%5D=jquery-core,jquery-migrate,utils&ver=4.7.
Error: Failed to fetch ....../wp-admin/load-scripts.php?c=1&load%5B%5D=jquery-core,jquery-migrate,utils&ver=4.7. Code 2152398924.

The files existed and I could load them directly in a browser. Didn’t make any sense.

Then I remembered I’d forgot to change the default server settings related to Apache (settings in the servers httpd.conf file), so the server wasn’t optimized: it’s weird that servers almost always start with awful settings.

After optimizing the server settings the site works perfectly. No idea which setting was causing the javascript files to not load correctly, but it’s a similar issue you are seeing.

For me under some scenarios the files aren’t accessed, so javascript features don’t work.

For you under some scenarios webpages time out tripping the Jetpack monitoring. Remember this doesn’t mean the site was down, means the webpage didn’t respond/load in under 20 seconds. It could have loaded in 30 seconds or it timed out, the question is why is it sometimes taking 20+ seconds to respond.

I tracked my issue down to a non-optimized server. The only difference between the domain mapped site and the others I’d transferred was the domain mapping plugin. Presumably the domain mapping plugin adds a slight strain (relative to a standard WordPress install) on the server at the WordPress backend and the default server settings couldn’t cope with it. Had I left the server as it was under times of stress the front end would have probably timed out like your site does.

I don’t know exactly what your issue is, most likely a culmination of all the plugins and theme features added together is too much for the server (you use a LOT of features requiring javascript/CSS files). The Display Widgets plugin is probably the straw that broke the camels back rather than THE cause.

Have a looked at your sites result on GTmetrix: https://gtmetrix.com/reports/www.tickettotakeoff.com/5y72pDys

Look at the WaterFall results and compare to one of my sites https://gtmetrix.com/reports/stallion-theme.co.uk/ACfdhPso (that’s on a cheap 3GB RAM VPS with around 50 other domains).

Based on the early results it looks like your server is more powerful than my cheap Godaddy VPS, but your site loads slower than mine overall because I understand how to optimize a theme/plugins etc… and you don’t: your setup would probably kill my server if I ran 50 domains that way ??

Your site: 62 Requests 2.2 MB 5.05s (onload: 5.15s)
My site: 32 Requests 456.6 KB 2.88s (onload: 2.64s)

You have a 20 second window before Jetpack sends a report, your site loads almost twice as many resources (62 vs 32) and 4 or 5 times more data.

Have you tried the Display Widgets SEO Plus Plugin? The core code is the same, but there are code fixes in the new plugin, I doubt it would make much difference performance wise, but…

If the Jetpack monitoring is regularly throwing out reports (several a day) I would try disabling a plugin/theme feature and run the site for a day to see if it helps. If it doesn’t try disabling another plugin/feature until there are no problems. This assumes the issue isn’t with the server.

If you want to rule out your theme (looks like your theme has a lot going on), switch to one of the default WordPress themes, run it for a few days so you get a good data set and see if it still times out.

David