In my previous post, I was talking about the effects of WordPress Plugins. Some plugins will have little to no effect. Others while have a large effect.
I was in a recent online forum discussion a particular plugin, Learn Dash.
I used the P3 plugin to see the performance of my theme and plugins. Then I moved the LearnDash plugin to a subdomain to focus between the two. This meant exporting the course/lesson/etc content and moving it to the new subdomain, to improve performance of the main site.
In using the P3 plugin, we found some other culprits as well. Mainly, or download plugin was causing a huge (multi-second) slow down.
When we moved the LearnDash plugin to a different subdomain, it caused about a half second speed improvement. Was it worth it… maybe. Every bit counts, and we’re at about 1.5 seconds for a logged in user.
As you can see, this load time hit is mainly because of Jetpack, a popular WordPress plugin. However, if you are not logged in, Jetpack doesn’t have as big of an effect. Therefore, while I left it for the main site, I’ve removed it from the site where my learners will need to sign in.
This should speed some things up quite a bit for the learners and offset the minor hit of LearnDash.
In both sites, the download plugin is removed to increase speed.
Things That Shouldn’t Matter
The number of courses and size of the content shouldn’t matter too much for loading initial pages. i.e. your home page or not course content pages. WordPress is fairly well organized and it handles large amounts of pages and content fairly well.
The size/amount of content per lesson/topic should only matter if that content is long. The users shouldn’t mind too much, within reason, since they are there with a purpose. It isn’t uncommon to have a page take 20-30 seconds to load from an LMS. More than that, you might need to consider how your content is loading.
If the content is too long, consider breaking it up, or using a streaming technology which will allow the learner to view part of the data while the rest is being loaded. This is how YouTube and similar services allow people to view videos without having to download the whole thing.
You may need to move it to a separate service to allow you to do this. That is beyond the scope of this document.
How did we move LearnDash to a Subdomain?
So this is a little technical, but I’ll detail how we set up LearnDash on a separate subdomain
Configure Subdomain
We went into our hosting panel for the web host and created a subdomain. From there we configured the redirects using their software.
We won’t go into the individual steps here since this is semi-unique to each web host. If you need assistance, we can be contracted to help, and you can contact us. But you may just want to open a ticket with your host provider.
Loading WordPress
In order to get two sets of plugins, and run in a subdomain, you have to have a second install of WordPress. We used Host Gator, which has a quick install.
From there, we copied over the Theme and Plugin files needed. In some cases we had to configure the new plugins. This did take some time. Make sure you don’t move it, or you will lose the plugin/theme and cause issues.
Copying WordPress/LearnDash Data
We used the Tools > Export to export the LearnDash data and any other data we needed from our original . Then we used the Import tool to import it into the new WordPress site.
We had only a small amount of data since we haven’t been using LearnDash very long. This made it fairly easy to move data and verify that it was correct.
If there are other posts/pages you need to copy, you might want to create those by copy/pasting. The import/export gets everything, you can’t limit it to just certain post/page/entries. Keep that in mind.
(re)Configuring Menus
We are using the same interface/theme for both the main domain and the sub-domain. So we are have to duplicate the menu with custom links for each of the main menu items.
This works as long as you don’t have too many links in your menu. Otherwise it will take a long time to reconfigure.
Final Thoughts
My suggestion is to figure out a plan early on. We have a lot of data for other teaching purposes on this site. But we don’t have a lot of LMS data. This made it a little easier for us, but it isn’t too complicated.
A little bit of prior planning for how you want to use the data and site, will always be beneficial in the long run.
Effects of Plugins on WordPress Websites – Part 2 was originally found on Access 2 Learn
