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WPML 3.2 Performance Improvements

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WPML 3.2 includes a few major updates and performance improvements. We are seeing SQL queries reduced by up to 75% and are looking for more test cases, to tune the performance the best we can.

Part of our work on WPML includes optimization for SQL queries. When you run a site on your localhost, the number of queries is less critical. However, production sites that have a lot of traffic and may have an external SQL server, will benefit a lot from reduced queries.

We use three test sites for our optimizations. These include a tiny site, a medium site and a huge site. Each helps with different optimizations. The tiny site represents a typical ‘brochure’ website with several pages. The huge site represents a busy e-commerce site with many posts (products). The ‘medium’ site is somewhere in the middle. In our journey, we find different optimizations that are more significant for each of these configurations.

So far, our testing shows the following numbers, when comparing WPML 3.2 to 3.1.9.4:

  • Home page in default language: about 20% fewer SQL queries.
  • Home page in another language: 20 to 75% fewer SQL queries.
  • Single page (about page) in default language: about 15% fewer SQL queries.
  • Single page (about page) in another language: 20 to 80% fewer SQL queries.
  • WP Dashboard: about 15% fewer queries.

Of course these figures depend on the complexity of the site.

Does this reduction in the number of queries also implies faster execution time? Generally yes, but it really depends. If you have a monster CPU and tiny database, your MySQL server works from RAM and you can hardly feel normal queries. If you are on a typical web server, with a big database and a lot of traffic, you’ll see these fewer queries directly translate into less CPU load.

Download WPML 3.2 Beta

The current WPML 3.2 beta is available for Multilingual CMS account holders. Log in to your WPML account and click on Downloads. Scroll to the bottom and you will see ‘CMS Beta Package’. Download it and unzip. You will receive ZIP files of all of WPML’s components in the beta version.

Please keep in mind that this code is not yet ready for production sites. We would love it if you can give WPML 3.2 beta a spin on a dev site, but don’t use it on production sites yet.

WPML 3.2 is now in QA and we are handling corner cases. As soon as it’s ready, you’ll receive it directly to your WordPress admin.

We Want to Test WPML’s Performance on Your Site

We want to make sure that these improvements work on a large variety of sites.

We’re looking for small to medium sites to do comparison tests on. We’ll test with 3.1.9.4 and 3.2 and make sure that these speed improvements work on all sites.

If you can help, we need complete Duplicator dumps of your site so we can test these sites locally. Please leave your comments and we’ll get back to you privately.

29 Responses to “WPML 3.2 Performance Improvements”

    • Thanks Rick. We would be delighted to use your WooCommerce site as reference. Bruce, who is responsible for WPML 3.2 performance, will be in touch tomorrow morning.

  3. I will ask a client of mine for whom I built a huge wiki-like site last year with 5 languages. I think that would be a perfect test-case for you! Will get back to you on this. Do you need Duplicator though or is there also another way of getting the dump to you?

  4. We have a 100+ website multisite network (4mln pageviews a month), could you be interested in do some testing on such config?

    best

  6. I have an old version of this plug in, my website was design for another agency and now I want to update all my plugins, how can I do it?

    • Hi, here you will find the instructions.
      https://wpml.org/faq/install-wpml/

      If you however want to upgrade from a very old version needed (I’m not sure how old it is), it would be best to ask for advice our support forum experts. In either case don’t forget to take a full backup first. It would be even better to copy your site first to a test one (using the Duplicator plugin) and try to upgrade there.

  8. I’ve already supplied minesh with a dump of my dev site (450 categories, 1400 products, super slow on current WPML) in this thread:

    https://wpml.org/forums/topic/how-can-wpml-be-optimized-more-the-site-is-loading-super-slow/

    so feel free to set that up on your end and test it out.

    I can get some performance gains on the front-end by using Genesis Framework Theme + W3 Cache Genesis plugin (as much as I’d rather see those improvements done without all the caching and such), but the major step up would be wp-admin loading times for WooCommerce sections (Products / Categories), Pages, etc. It takes 20+ seconds on certain sections to load right now.

  9. Hi,
    Great news about the speed optimisations. I would be happy to let you test on my site just send me an email.

    Thanks

  10. Hi,
    Your offer comes just right because I’m currently looking for optimization possibilities to the speed performance of my blog, especially regarding WPML plugins.
    I’m happy to let you test my site.
    Kind regards
    Jens

  11. I have some websistes to test as well. The frontend is quite fast (CDN + caching) but the backend is really slow. So happy to test!

  12. Just checking in as I haven’t heard back from anyone at WPML about testing in case you missed my comment.

  13. Also, does version 3.2 also improve performance for woocommerce product categories, blog categories, and single woocommerce product pages?

    According to newrelic, these are the slowest pages on our site (in order):

    /single-product 1,890 ms
    /archive-product 1,830 ms
    /wp-comments-post.php 1,820 ms
    /archive 1,800 ms
    /taxonomy-product_cat 1,770 ms
    /single 1,530 ms
    /contact 1,450 ms
    /404 1,410 ms
    /page 1,180 ms
    /index.php 563 ms

  14. If you want I can also give you a complete duplicator dump.
    I have a small site but WPML is responsibe for 93.000 php ticks of the 108.000 in total . So both Mulilingual CMS and String translation are responsible for 1 sec of page load (according to P3 – Plugin Performance Profiler) I have started a tread about this before but we agreed to talk about it again when version 3.2 would come out.
    Looking forward to your reply.

    • Thank you. I will notify people responsible for performance testing. I’m not sure if we already have enough candidates but if we need more, for sure we will contact you. Thank you very much.

  15. You can test also mine…. is pretty big… and lately I had to increase the max exec time to 200 seconds, because 120 was not enough.

    1 year ago 30 seconds was ok… then always increasing and increasing as the site was growing up

    • Thank you. I’m not sure if we already have enough candidates but if we need more, we will contact you. Thank you very much.

    • We are now doing a second round of QA. This version includes a ton of changes and we want to make sure we don’t break anything. There’s a lot to test against.

      Right now, WPML 3.2 is looking very stable in our testing. Would you like us to help your client?

      First, I suggest that you send us a copy of that site (if this is possible), so that we can validate the performance improvements. Let me know if this is possible and we will send you details.

      We are planning to release another development version today. After we see that everything is good for your client site, it would be OK for you to update a production site with the development version.

      Does this help?

      • Hi Amir,

        Thanks for the clear reply. Currently running Version 3.1.9-b3 actually, it helps a lot regarding speed already. But it would be nice to be able to handle the updates through WP again ofcourse, so the client can do small updates himself also 🙂

        Br. Stefan

  17. What is the current status of the 3.2 version? We have a client with a large webshop that has a very slow backend… Are you still looking for tests?