Advice to Speed up Wordpress Multisite and scripts?

CMS & WordPress
1

I have a registration site built on multisite. For the most part everything is now running smooth. We do still have the occasional person complaining its slow. I know this can be from many causes, but was wondering if there are any recommendations that work well with Gravity forms. I was thinking of using a service like Cloudflare or something, would this help the performance of scripts and stuff? I also enabled the ability to turn on GZip for the site, but i havent done it yet.The site is live at https://www.kickinkaratesystems.com/akitournament
Any suggestions?

2

I’m curious. Why would you not take advantage of gzip to help reduce bandwidth?

3

I had it enabled on my VPS, but I just got real busy to enable on everyones site. Are there any reasons doing this could break the site?

4

If the browser sends “accept” headers (AFAIK most “modern” browsers do) the server will send the gzip, if not, it sends the unxipped file.

So it shouldn’t break anything, but will make an enhanced experience available for those that can take advantage of it.

5

try installing wp cache … might help abit ~

6

WordPress is a blog script and not a CMS, so trying to use it as a CMS will result in issues like this, especially if you are using one instance of WordPress to run multiple sites.

The biggest problem with using WordPress without any kind of caching is that every single hit you receive is a fresh call to the database to get your content, even if that content hasn’t changed for years. Any CMS on the market for the past decade will cache static content so that it is accessed fast and without having to hit the database.

In the short term, I would recommend the WP Super Cache plugin and installing YSlow onto Firefox (with Firebug installed) so that you can go through any needed client-side optimisations, but the biggest issue with WordPress is always speed, whether it be with caching or just the general sluggishness of the script when it is hacked to use as a CMS. A long term solution would be to look at a proper CMS, ideally one you can use on top of an existing PHP framework.