The events calendar is slow

Hey @vinos21,

Performance issues like this can be a great headache, I know.

I went to your site and the first load of the calendar seems pretty fast to me. Here’s a video https://www.loom.com/share/8969a8a1ed0c45c784dc2c43c208eda9 of what I found (In many tries, I never saw a slow load). It sounds like you are also describing this as an intermittent issue. Is that the case? …

Does this issue happen when logged in and logged out? Have you tested this on different machines? Do you have our month view cache enabled at Events > Settings > Viewing?

Have you tried the Query Monitor plugin to see if you can spot exactly what’s slowing the page down? I would recommend that: https://querymonitor.com/wordpress-debugging/how-to-use/

Lastly, that’s a lot of images on the month view calendar, which definitely could slow a page down in my experience.

Best of regards,
John

The events calendar loads very quickly for people who already viewed my calendar before but for first time viewers it is 30 seconds or more and most of our customers are mobile viewers so we don’t really need to worry about the desktop speed.

I don’t really know what to do with the google page speed information can you help?

Here is the link to view the google page speed results: https://ibb.co/4M4fb5T

This is a constant issue like if I am on mobile and click the calendar link it takes me 30 seconds to load no matter if I am logged in or on a different mobile device.

Hi @vinos21 ,

Thank you for your message and the clarification.

For us to better understand your situation, and learn more about what your WordPress environment looks like, could you provide the version of the following?

1. PHP
2. WordPress
3. The Events Calendar
4. Theme and Version

PHP Version: 7.4.33
WordPress Version: 6.6.2
The Events Calendar Version: 6.6.4.2
Active Theme: Astra Child (Version 1), while the parent Astra theme is Version 4.8.1.

If it helps, I can provide a full list of all installed plugins. I deactivated each plugin (except The Events Calendar) and tested the site speed while reactivating them one by one. The speed didn’t change much, except for WooCommerce, which slowed it down slightly—by just a few seconds.

Hi @vinos21

I tried viewing your calendar again and it loads pretty fast for me, around 2-4 seconds. If you haven’t checked this article yet, please try the recommendation provided from there and see if that makes a difference?

I’ve followed all the recommendations from the article, but my website is still very slow on mobile. While the desktop version performs better, the majority of my customers access the site via mobile, so this is a major concern. Additionally, my Google PageSpeed score is terrible. Any suggestions on how to fix these issues?

Here is the link to see the google page speed score on mobile: https://ibb.co/4M4fb5T

My calendar take a very long time to load.

My Calendar’s largest contentful paint is 30 seconds.
My calendar’s speed index is slow
My calendar’s total blocking time is slow
My calendar’s first contentful paint is slow.

Hi I am still having problems with the plugin can you please help me resolve the problem. Google Page Speed Insights says that the speed index on mobile is 4-9 seconds which isn’t true it is normally 30 seconds and the largest contentful paint element is 29,000 ms which is way to much

Hi it’s been almost 5 days since your last reply.
Can you please help?

Hi I still need help with my calendar

Hi @vinos21

I apologize for the delayed response. I just tested it on my Android phone, and at first, it took some time to load. However, after the initial loading, every time I refreshed the page, it loaded almost instantly.

See- https://share.zight.com/NQu978K1

It seems that all your events have been set as featured events, causing around 100 featured images to be displayed in the calendar. This could be the reason for the slow loading time on initial load due to the large number of images.

I hope this helps. Let me know if you have further concerns.

Hi,

The issue I’m facing is that the calendar takes a long time to load on the first visit. However, once someone refreshes the page or visits again, the loading speed is normal thanks to caching.

My business offers painting classes, so it’s important that the events are set as “featured” so people can see the images of the paintings they’ll be working on. When I turn off the “featured” option, the events still appear on the calendar, but their images don’t show up, which is a problem.

On mobile, it seems like the calendar is trying to load all the events at once, and this causes delays. Ideally, the calendar should only load the events for the day a person selects. For example, if someone picks October 20th, it would be great if only those events load quickly—maybe with AJAX loading, which doesn’t refresh the page.

Another issue is with past events. I don’t want to delete them, but it would be helpful if they were hidden from public view. For example, if today is October 1st and someone selects September 21st, the past events would be hidden from the calendar, while admin users could still access them without any problem. This might also help reduce loading times by not displaying unnecessary images for old events.

Maybe there’s a way to optimize how events load on mobile. Instead of loading all 100 events for the entire month at once, it would be better if only a few events (like 3) load for the day the customer selects. Alternatively, the calendar could load events in weekly batches. For example, if a customer selects a day in the second week of the month, it could take a moment to load only those events for that week.

I don’t want to change the page layout—I really like how the calendar widget is at the top, letting customers select a day, with the events for that specific day displayed underneath.

Hi @vinos21

Thanks for your message and for sharing your feedback.

Unfortunately, your desired use-case scenario may be possible with some custom coding, but if you decide to give that a try, please note we cannot provide full support for custom implementations like that.

A good place to start would be our Themer’s Guide, if you’re comfortable doing it DIY. https://theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/guide/customization/

Also, I’ll be sharing this with our product team. We review feedback regularly to plan out our product roadmaps, so someone will be taking a look at this shortly.

Let me know if you have other questions or concerns.