Background of the issue:
I have a problem with the performance of my website when I use the WPML plugin. My website's performance is low, and pages take a long time to load. I have contacted my dev team, and they improved the loading time slightly, but they concluded that the WPML plugin might be the cause. I have 8 total languages that I translate to, with English as the default. I use the plugin with WooCommerce ML to convert currency for the respective languages. The plugin is up to date.
Symptoms:
Website performance is slow, and pages take a long time to load when using the WPML plugin.
Questions:
Is there some way that I can optimize the website to load the pages faster?
Is there another plugin that I can use to help with page loading so that I don't have to uninstall WPML?
I got the following from my dev team.
The first thing is that when we disable the WPML plugin, my slider shows all my sliders on the website. The second thing is, the website breaks on the wordpress side when we disable all the plugins except for the WPML. The third is that the website load 13.2s long, which is still long. The fourth thing, it is the same as the second one.
The other thing my team gave me is that on the main website is that the language drop down is gone, why is that?
The sliders will all show because when you disable WPML, there is only one language, so it's showing all languages. As for the website breaking with other plugins disabled, I suggest enabling the debug log so you can see which errors are there showing what is breaking the site.
Please reivew our chat and provide the site page load times for the 4 different scenarious that I outlined.
The language switcher will not show if WPML is disabled, and you may just need to add it back to the menu once you activate WPML again. This is why we recommend testing these different scenarious in a staging site.
Here is the full report on the steps that you gave me to follow:
Without the steps on the website speed current: 15s (From clean search on the browser for truzzer.com)
On the staging it takes: 50.1s (From clean search on the browser for hidden link)
1. Test page speed with current theme and all plugins except WPML active:
- Loading time is 19.5s
- Slider is shows all the slides
- Language drop down is gone
2. Test page speed with current theme and ONLY WPML plugins active, all others deactive.
- Loading time is (Due to error below, the loading time will only show for the plugins that is active with the WPML that is active)
- There has been a critical error on this website. Please check your site admin email inbox for instructions (When I disable all of the plugins except for the WPML).
3. Test page speed with current plugins except WPML with a default theme such as Twenty Twenty Four.
- Loading time is 13.7s
4. Test page speed with only WPML plugins and a default theme such as Twenty Twenty Four.
- Loading time is 3.2s
- Nothing broke then when I disabled all of the other plugins due that I use a default theme and not the custom theme
Additional information:
Plugins that we use on our website:
- Abandoned Cart Lite for WooCommerce
- Advanced Order Export For WooCommerce
- All-in-One WP Migration
- All-in-One WP Migration Unlimited Extension
- Asset CleanUp: Page Speed Booster
- Code Snippets
- Contact Form 7
- Contact Form 7 Multilingual
- Country Restrictions for WooCommerce
- Custom Scripts for Customeser
- Duplicate Page
- EAN Barcode Generator for WooCommerce: UPC, ISBN & GTIN Inventory
- Elementor
- Embed Optimizer
- EWWW Image Optimizer
- Extra Product Options & Add-Ons for WooCommerce
- Facebook for WooCommerce
- German Market
- Google for WooCommerce
- GTM4WP - A Google Tag Manager (GTM) plugin for WordPress
- Head, Footer and Post Injections
- Image Prioritizer
- LiteSpeed Cache
- Menu Icons
- Modern Image Formats
- Mollie Payments for WooCommerce
- Performance Lab
- Performant Translations
- Pixel Manager for WooCommerce
- PixelYourSite
- Post/Page specific custom CSS
- Really Simple Security
- Redirection
- Safe SVG
- Site Kit by Google
- Slider Revolution
- Swap Google Fonts Display
- Table of Contents Plus
- Tracking Code Manager
- Variation Swatches for WooCommerce
- Web Worker Offloading
- WooCommerce
- WooCommerce Advanced Product Labels
- WooCommerce Google Feed Manager
- WooCommerce Multilingual & Multicurrency
- WooCommerce Square
- Woodmart Core
- WP Fastest Cache
- WP File Manager
- WPML CMS Nav
- WPML Media Translation
- WPML Multilingual CMS
- WPML SEO
- WPML Sticky Links
- WPML String Translation
- Yoast SEO
From the test results, it seems the best results are from when you have WPML with a default theme. All other options still show slow load times, or a critical error. Did you enable the debug log to get details on the critical error? That may help determine what is happening in your custom theme that is causing issues.
WordPress includes a debug mode that helps reveal PHP problems. Let's enable this and see if there are any errors we can locate.
To enable it, open your wp-config.php file and look for
In this case the errors will be saved to a debug.log log file inside the /wp-content/directory.
The wp-config.php is located in your WordPress root directory. It’s the same file where the database configuration settings are. You will have to access it by FTP or SFTP in order to edit it.
If you open wp-config.php and that define statement is not there, you can add it right before this line:
/* That's all, stop editing! Happy blogging. */
Please note that you’ll see everything, not only related to our Plugins. This will most likely include messages from other plugins, your theme, and sometimes even WordPress core. The messages appear all over the place.
Sometimes they appear right on top, but they can also appear in the middle of the page.
After enabling the debug mode, please try to replicate the issue. Navigate to the page where the error message being displayed. The errors will be either displayed on the screen or logged in the debug.log log file inside the /wp-content/directory.
Paste the latest lines here. No need to paste the entire log file, just 50 lines or so will do. Please censor any sensitive information.
Due to the performance results, please test one more time with a defaul theme with all plugins (including WPML) active. If the page load time is not slow then we will know that the issue is related to the custom theme, in which case you will need to look at the custom functions added to the theme and try to determine what is happening. This is why debug log may be helpful in pointing you in the right direction.
