Background of the issue:
We are currently experiencing an issue with the WPML plugin on our website related to language switching. When users switch languages, an AJAX request is triggered, which causes a delay of approximately 2-3 seconds. This delay negatively impacts the user experience as it slows down the entire language switching process. admin-ajax.php action: switching_language
Symptoms:
Delay of approximately 2-3 seconds when switching languages using WPML.
Questions:
How can we optimize the AJAX request to reduce the delay and improve the overall performance?
Are there specific configurations or code adjustments we can implement to speed up this process?
What are the best practices for handling AJAX requests in WPML?
The "admin-ajax.php" file contains all the code for routing Ajax requests on WordPress.
WordPress uses it to refresh the page’s contents without reloading it, thus making it dynamic and interactive to the users.
Removing it is not possible, however, we can review your site to verify that everything is configured in the best way possible to increase performance.
I would like to request temporary access (wp-admin and FTP) to your site to test the issue.
(preferably to a test site where the problem has been replicated if possible)
**Before we proceed It is necessary to take FULL BACKUP of your database and your website. Providing us with access, you agree that a backup has been taken **
I often use the Duplicator plugin for this purpose: http://wordpress.org/plugins/duplicator/
You will find the needed fields for this below the comment area when you log in to leave your next reply.
The information you enter is private which means only you and I have access to it.
NOTE: If access to the live site is not possible and the staging site does not exist please provide me with a duplicator package created with the duplicator plugin.
Thank you for uploading it to the directory, unfortunately, I am still having trouble deploying this package.
May I ask you to please use the information I shared above to migrate a copy of the site to our cloudways server, this will allow us to ensure the migration is not corrupted.
If you can share a dev copy on the server that our team can access that would be great as it would allow us to test further and get you a solution faster 🙂
I have enabled the private field reply to share access to the dev copy.
I have done a few tests and see the following (see screenshot).
The admin-ajax.php has a high load time and the payload is indeed switching_language.
However, testing on your staging server where the different domain per language is not used (languages in directories ) the admin-ajax.php action is not triggered nor does it have such high load.
Additionally testing on the live site, IF I remove the parameter /?_gl= this is not triggered either.
Is this parameter being added by Google Analytics or Tag Manager for the cross domain tracking or another 3rd party plugin?
What are your results if you temporarily deactivate it?
Thank you, when I run the same test now admin-ajax.php is no longer giving an err 400 which seems to be related to the "Auto sign-in/sign-out feature" option.
Let's continue with some more testing. Is it possible to temporarily deactivate the
?_gl parameter, i would like to test if this is related to the performance issue you are getting.
what I notice is that it is the ?_gl parameter that is the initiator of the admin-ajax.php query now and that the page loads OK, however it takes up to 3-4seconds to fully load, and once it does that is when the parameter is added to the URL.
In summary this is what I see--> page loads all content OK, but keeps loading, does a quick refresh and the parameter is added
