KennyLL

OK. Thanks for the very quick response!

So does marking entries as ‘spam’ really do anything other than move the entries to the ‘Spam’ folder? The notification emails would have already been sent.

And thanks for the recommendation. It doesn’t make it clear if you can specifically block a manually-entered email address, rather than blocking a large collection of blacklisted words. And unsure the client would be able to afford the cost for just that single additional feature anyway. So may need to look for other solutions.

Hi. Wondering if a resolution was ever reached on this issue as we appear to be having the same problem. A couple new posts, including one from 2 days ago, weren’t showing on site even after doing a hard refresh. Had to go to settings and click ‘Clear all Caches’ (this was set to 3 hours, so we changed it to 2 hours to see if any difference). After clicking the clear caches button, the new posts then immediately showed on the front-end.

Our site does not have any caching plugins on it and is fully up-to-date. In Site Health, we get warnings that ‘Page Cache is Not Detected’ and ‘You should use a persistent object cache’, so don’t think there is any external caching happening.

• Any workarounds?

I believe the style is changed or injected when setting Block Editor > Core Blocks Spacing to ‘Legacy‘ in Customizer.

Thanks for the response. Does something like Duplicator work well for copying over a few specific posts or pages with all of their content?

At first glance, it looks like a more full-fledged cloning or backup type of plugin. And a bit pricey if we wanted to use on many of our sites. When we do a full-on clone of an entire site, we generally use cPanel backup & restore functionality, which works well and is pretty simple. This is more for copying a few pages or posts and their content over…

Great, thanks! Much cleaner now…

Hmm, bummer. The goal is to animate those individual post items – maybe have them fade in one-at-a-time or something. For the CSS/JS solution we’re using, we need specific class(es) on the element that needs to be animated.

I’m not sure we would want to re-engineer the entire Query Loop Block just for something like this.

– Would I need to develop a javascript method of attaching the classes to those elements or something?

Looking into this plugin and was wondering about that. But also wondering what swiper.js and swiper.css are needed for, and/or if you were able to disable those as well?

Thank you Dion, this is very helpful.

– Is there a way to determine roughly how large the update packages are, so we know how much network bandwidth & speed factor in?

– And does roughly 8 seconds to do all of those steps seem about inline with a modern, well configured server, or abnormally fast?

And updating WP is just the main test that seems to show the exaggerated difference in timing most clearly. Other admin processes feel similarly sluggish on Server A. And when testing updating about 10 various plugins at once, the difference is pretty stark as well – about 2-3 minutes for Server A, and about 20-30 seconds for Server B.

So seems like from this it could be: A) Network issues; B) PHP configuration issues (though both servers are pretty similarly configured); C) MySQL issues (we do have difference here of MariaDB vs. MySQL).

There are far too many unknowns here (network/disk hardware, MySQL/Apache configuration, etc) to offer an assessment — and besides, this site is for WordPress support, not server support. You should contact the hosting company.

Yeah, I know it’s a challenging issue. I was mostly hoping to get some ideas of what specific resources WordPress taxes when doing something like software updates, where I’m seeing such a drastic difference.

If my hosting company is not super familiar with the inner workings of WordPress admin processes, they may not know where to start in debugging. I’m sure most performance requests are more general, or geared towards front-end display, which may be easier to measure.

I was trying to find something regarding what exactly happens during a WP update, for instance (e.g, how many files & how large need to be downloaded & overwrite what’s current, etc.), but not having any luck so far…

Hi, thanks for the quick reply! I think I’ve perused the guide at WPBeginner, or at least something similar to it, before. But I’ll dig more into the article about admin-ajax.php.

And just to clarify: the FRONT END performance of the sites on the different servers is pretty similar. When I test on GTMetrix, WebPageTest, Pingdom, PageSpeed Insights, etc., the results are typically very close (less than 0.5s difference at most, usually less). Sometimes Server A is faster on some metrics, too. Some of this may boil down to location – Server A is at a data center near Chicago I believe, while Server B is local in Los Angeles.

Most of the info on performance I find (like the article on WPBeginner) is focused on front end display, which completely makes sense. We try to follow a lot of these recommendations, including using W3 Total Cache on all sites, etc.

I’m just trying to narrow down why the exact same site, running same theme, plugins, etc, is so much drastically faster in the BACK END. So any performance hits the theme or plugin may be imposing would be exactly the same.

Thanks for any insight here!

Maybe it would be nice to list the pros/cons of using a theme.json file vs using ‘add_theme_support’ method?!?

I know when I did pretty much the same thing shown via ‘add_theme_support’ function I did NOT have to also add the CSS variables to my style sheet. Those are corrected in the inline ‘global-styles-inline-css’ when anything in theme.json file is changed. So it handles back-end and front-end in one place.

But I don’t recall off top of my head other pros/cons to either method…

Hi, I have a follow-up question here. I am following the conversation on GitHub to see if any resolution comes about, but that may be a while. In the meantime I’ve started creating a theme.json file for sites to get sizes back to what they should be.

QUESTION:
– Is there any way for the listing in the Typography > Size box to display the “name” value from theme.json instead of the “size” value?

I know it will show the name as a tooltip if someone is patient enough to hover & wait, but it would be nicer if an arbitrary name that I could choose would be used instead. I could always use the size value as the name if that’s what I thought would be most helpful, but would be nice to be able to determine what is shown.

Where this becomes a problem is if you are using anything but a pretty small numerical value for the size (like the default WP even pixel values). If you need to use longer units, as for relative sizes like ems, this can break the interface. For example, we have a site with a root font-size of 17px. If we want to get an even 15px font-size using ems, it would be ‘0.882352941176471em’. This completely breaks the interface rendering it unusable.

Also, seeing these random em values, even if shorter (e.g, ‘0.8125’) is going to be very confusing to the end client. They’re not going to do the math to figure out the value, and they shouldn’t have to even think about it anyway. They should just decide whether they want the type to be ‘Small’, ‘Medium’, ‘Large’, etc. The theme developer (like us) decides how large these values equate to in the theme.json file.

Thanks for any insight here!

Hi, thanks for pointing that out! I hadn’t seen that thread when searching yesterday. I can sometimes get a little cross-eyed trying to follow cross-references & alternate issues on a GitHub thread, but that is helpful. It appears to have no real resolution as of now, so I suppose I’ll just have to keep an eye on it.

I guess I now have to just make a decision on how best to tackle this, and other related issues, with the new WP 5.9 release in a way that won’t have to be undone if these issues get resolved in another way directly in core WP.

Is creating a theme.json file in a child theme pretty safe & ‘future-proof’, given that the parent theme (e.g, Astra) may do something similar that might conflict or render things unnecessary?!?

Do I overwrite the CSS rule custom properties (e.g., ‘–wp-preset-font-size-medium’) in my stylesheet, and will this stick around for the foreseeable future?!?

I’m just going through 1 particular site that was launched in last 6 months and updated to WP 5.9. Beyond the font-size issues that I had to hunt down & override, I also happened to notice color overlay opacities getting overridden/reset or something. If we don’t keep detailed screenshots before every update (time consuming), we can miss something that’s not super obvious. And to have to carefully look over all the styling of our sites when doing a WP update is also just very time-consuming in itself. Our clients aren’t going to pay for this. Ugh. Hard enough to keep on top of the parent theme author’s wackiness when there are updates…

Hi Herman,
Thank you for the reply. Yes, we had eventually found that doc and were able to use it to jump-start the solution that worked to disable the featured image.

Ah, thank you for the thorough response here! I missed that in the error log.

The Security Headers are a bit new to us, and had copied settings from another site that must not have had a form running Ajax. I’m guessing an Ajax ‘refresh’ may get picked up as an iFrame behavior or something?!?

Will have to keep learning more about proper Security Headers, but will leave that default set for sites, as it seems like a secure options.

THANKS!