v5.0 Categories Don’t Show or Slow to Display

This may be a plugin or theme conflict. Please attempt to disable all plugins, and use one of the default (Twenty*) themes. If the problem goes away, enable them one by one to identify the source of your troubles.

If you can install plugins, install “Health Check”: https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/health-check/ On the troubleshooting tab, you can click the button to disable all plugins and change the theme for you, while you’re still logged in, without affecting normal visitors to your site.

Please can someone help me understand why this delay may be happening?

The new editor talks to the WordPress backend via the REST API. If your site is slow in general, then there will be a delay when it retrieves things like the list of categories or tags. It also can be slow if you have a very large number of categories.

For improving general performance, the metric you want to look at is time-to-first-byte (TTFB). If you can speed that up, then the site will seem much faster.

No idea if this reported issue is related to the problems on your website?

It’s not. That issue has to do with extremely large posts slowing down processing in the javascript. A delay in items appearing would not be caused by javascript processing, but by delays in retrieving the data from the server. Truth is that you need the server to be speedy for sites to not seem slow, and this applies to the new editor as well. Slow hosting systems will just be slow, so you might need to move to a better hosting environment.

Side note to @katerila,

Please do not jump into other topics. If the troubleshooting already posted made no difference for you, then, as per the Forum Welcome, please post your own topic. A lot more people will see your post this way. That way you stand a good chance of getting the assistance you want. Despite any similarity in symptoms, your issue is likely to be completely different because of possible differences in physical servers, accounts, hosts, plugins, theme, configurations, etc. Thus one problem, on one setup is not indicative of the functionality and reliability of an application as a whole.

Your reply has been archived.

So I went through and took it back to a basic theme and no plugins and it was fairly quick.

The issue doesn’t seem to be down to any single plugin but exponentially increases in time as more plugins are enabled.

I’m hosting with 1and1 (Ionos) and just scaled up to maximum performance levels (performance level 5) on my hosting package which made some difference but is still around 10 seconds.

My hosting package provides me with 19GB of max RAM, 1,500 process/min, 768MB PHP Memory Limit.

My PHP Memory limit is also set in the wp-config file.

My website isn’t super fast and my hosting package isn’t the best on the market; but simply put; WordPress shouldn’t require VPS or Dedi servers to work.

I am not going overboard with plugins, but do run WooCommerce and need some additional plugins to manage that; as well as plugins for the core content system. I’m running ColorMag theme and a total of 67 active plugins

The functionality used to work and now it’s slow. Why a change was made to move to an API, which will obviously cause issues for many users who are on slower hosting packages could be a breaking point for my wordpress sites, I do not know.

I’ve spoken to my host and they can’t see any other issues and simply concluded that if I need it to be faster than it is then to move to VPS / Dedi; this is not an option.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 2 months ago by Anonymous User 14746719.
• This reply was modified 6 years, 2 months ago by Anonymous User 14746719.

Go to your site and look at this page on it: /wp-json/wp/v2/categories

So, if your site is example.com, then that would be https://example.com/wp-json/wp/v2/categories

That’s the API call to request the categories listing from the REST API. If that is slow, then it’s going to be slow to get the categories.

Thanks Samuel. That loads pretty quickly though so must be something more fundamentally wrong.

https://www.townvoice.co.uk/wp-json/wp/v2/categories

Below is a screenshot of the Network Console (It does also appear that the categories API is called after everything else

Network Console Screenshot

• This reply was modified 6 years, 2 months ago by Anonymous User 14746719.
• This reply was modified 6 years, 2 months ago by Anonymous User 14746719.

Hmm. What plugins are you running? Try the Health Check plugin mentioned above to get a listing of them and to run some other tests on your site.

https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/health-check/

I’d guess some plugin is being very slow to initialize and is slowing everything else down for you.

Yeah I did exactly that; ran health check and enabled one by one, but it just seemed to get incrementally slower each time I enabled rather than identifying a specific plugin that suddenly made everything go slow.

I think part of the issue certainly is that WordPress is loading the categories and taxonomy right at the end rather than asyncronously?

I did wonder if it had anything to do with either SSL or going through Cloudflare, but the fact the API calls directly in browser are quick make this even stranger.

Plugins:

Ad Inserter
Ads by Datafeedr
Advanced Flat Rate Shipping For WooCommerce
Akismet Anti-Spam
AP Extended Mime Types
Booster for WooCommerce
Checkout Field Editor for WooCommerce
CloudflareContact Form 7
Contact Form 7 Conditional Fields
Contact Form 7 Live Preview
Content Aware Sidebars
Cryout Serious Theme Settings
Custom Facebook Feed
Facebook for WooCommerce
Facebook Tab Manager
Facebook Video Embed
FlamingoFooter Putter
Google Analytics Dashboard for WP (GADWP)
Google Captcha (reCAPTCHA) by BestWebSoft
Health Check & Troubleshooting
Hide Page And Post Title
Imsanity
Insert Headers and Footers
Login Logo
Material Design for Contact Form 7
NextScripts: SNAP Pro Upgrade Helper
NextScripts: Social Networks Auto-Poster
Page Builder by SiteOrigin
Page Duplicator
PB oEmbed HTML5 Audio – with Cache Support
Perfect WooCommerce Brands
Photo Gallery by Supsystic
PHP Code Widget
Really Simple CAPTCHA
Recent Posts Widget With Thumbnails
Show Hide Author
SiteOrigin CSS
SiteOrigin Widgets Bundle
SmushSSL Insecure Content Fixer
TablePressThe Events Calendar
UpdraftPlus – Backup/Restore
UsageDDVarkTech Pricing Deals for WooCommerce
VarkTech Pricing Deals PRO for WooCommerce
WC Fields Factory
WD Facebook Feed
Weblizar Twitter Tweets
Widget Options
WooCommerceWooCommerce Cart
WooCommerce PDF Invoices & Packing Slips
WooCommerce Product Slider
WooCommerce Stripe Gateway
WP Change Default Email
WP Embed Facebook
WP Fastest Cache
WP RSS Aggregator
WP RSS Aggregator – Excerpts and Thumbnails
WP-DBManager
WP-PageNavi
Yoast SEO
YouTube

Side note to @gerardbr ,

Please do not jump into other topics. If the troubleshooting already posted made no difference for you, then, as per the Forum Welcome, please post your own topic. A lot more people will see your post, and that way you stand a good chance of getting the assistance you want. Despite any similarity in symptoms, your issue is likely to be completely different because of possible differences in physical servers, accounts, hosts, plugins, theme, configurations, etc. Thus one problem, on one setup is not indicative of the functionality and reliability of an application as a whole.

I’ll be archiving your post.

Has there been any movement on this? I’ve noticed the same thing on one of my websites. I’m hoping it’s a theme thing and it needs to be addressed there, but wondered if you’d managed to figure out if there was any one culprit @miketurnermk ?