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Jose Morales-Mendizabal
19,175 PointsWordpress native search form takes long time to display results
Hi, I've made a custom Wordpress theme for a client thanks to Zac Gordon 's lessons. The site works great and all, however there seems to be a small issue when one searches for keywords through the search form that can be found on the page at www.juanturcios.com/archive When I search for a keyword that I know for sure that is somehwere in a post such as "wedding" or "photography" the search results are returned within seconds. However when I search for a silly keyword that I know is NOT mentioned in any post such as "dragon sillystring" Wordpress takes about a minute or more before returning the 404-ish page I designed to tell the user no posts were found that matched the keywords entered.
Is this normal behavior? Or do you think it is taking this long because I have the W3 Total Cache plugin caching the database? Any tips on improving the performance of the search form?
I have included the code I wrote in the searchform.php that I included in my custom theme if you need to see what's going on under the hood.
Thanks!
<div><label class="screen-reader-text" for="s"><i class="fa fa-search fa-lg search-icon"></i></label>
<input type="text" value="" name="s" id="search-field" autocomplete="off" placeholder="Search for a photoshoot..."/>
<input type="hidden" value="post" name="post_type" id="post_type" />
<input type="submit" id="searchsubmit" value="Search" />
</div>
</form>
3 Answers
Zac Gordon
Treehouse Guest TeacherHey Jose Morales, honestly a number of sites don't really need to have heavy caching to perform quickly. I'd use Pingdom Tools to test the site with and without the plugin. You might also want to play around with the cache settings. There may be one little setting that you can disable that will solve the problem.
Zac Gordon
Treehouse Guest TeacherIf it's possible, I'd be curious how it performs if you set it up locally
Jose Morales-Mendizabal
19,175 PointsThanks for the quick response Zac Gordon. turns out it WAS the cache. I emptied the cache and deactivated the plugin and it now works super fast. Do you think in this case database caching hinders performance and should consider not using the plugin? or should I not care about users potentially waiting minutes due to search for irrelevant keywords and activate the plugin? The thing is that since the website I designed is for a photographer and thus heavy on images, not including the plugin results in slower load times.
Zac Gordon
Treehouse Guest TeacherActually this is not a super uncommon complaint. There are some native search engine alternative plugins that you might want to try and see if they're faster.
I don't think this is caching related, although you could easily delete your caches and turn off the plugin to test.
Jose Morales-Mendizabal
19,175 PointsJose Morales-Mendizabal
19,175 PointsYou're absolutely right. I did some experimenting tonight and turns out caching the WP Object was hindering the search load time. I've turned off that setting and now the website is as performant as it can be for the time being. Thanks for your helpful insights!