Hi there

Our Shoppica themed WordPress site was SO, so incredibly slow, we finally moved it to Dreamhost’s premium WordPress hosting solution DreamPress to try and improve the speed issues. But we are still having issues and I really don’t know if it is the theme that is causing us headaches or the hosting.

When we update an image in, for example, in Shoppica Image Banner widget, it does not automatically update on the frontend – particually when logged out. DreamPress uses Varnish caching and they are trying to assure me that there hosting is not the issue. Other than Varnish HTTP Purge – which is meant to purge the cache each time we do an edit, I don’t have any other caching plugins installed.

Does the Shoppica WordPress theme have any inbuilt caching? I am about to lose a client over this and I can’t get any answers.

PLEASE, PLEASE help.

I have pasted an email from my client for your reference below.

Regards,
Karen

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geemancommunications . 27 August 2013 15:07

To: Karen Thompson , Sam Allison

Hi Karen

I have just got the invitation for the email campaign software, so looking forward to this improving the uptake of our newsletters, but I think the sorry state of the ad updates needs to be addressed. As per your advise I took off the varnish plug-in, and while it initially seemed to be working well and updating the store pages fine (I will address the home page later) and updating fine, when it strikes a glitch it all goes to the pack very rapidly. A prime example would be my experience with the Rotorua page last night – I will attempt to work through the process as best I can.

Firstly, here is the ad as it should have appeared:

Inline images 1

Having initially updated the ad using the “replace media” option, I went to the page as I now do to double check the ad has uploaded (refreshing the page beforehand of course). Upon checking, I was met with this as the ad:

Inline images 2Inline images 3

Which was the ad for Levin, which had been uploaded to the Levin page successfully. So I returned to the media library to check the file and was met with this under the entry for Rotorua:

Inline images 4

Still no relation to the ad that I had loaded (still the previous week’s in fact). Out of interest I clicked on the “view page” option and was met with this:

Inline images 5

So go back to the library and into edit and I am met with this:

Inline images 6

Well, at least it is the image that has appeared on the page. It is still not the image I loaded to that page, or the right store, but at least I have the same image twice, which is something I guess. Click on “View Attachment Page” and I get this:

Inline images 7

Okay, back to weekly special rotorua and click on edit image:

Inline images 8

Wow, it’s actually the image I downloaded. Not the image that appears on the website mind, but at least the actual image. I can’t save this image if I don’t do anything with it, so I rotate it, save it, rotate it back, save it, just to say I’d modified it, and update it. Back to the weekly special rotorua and it does seem to have at least forced the update both here, in the library and on the page (which is still correct on the different browsers I tried when I last checked), but it has taken me almost as long as it has to write this email to get the update done, and in the process I have been faced with editing 3 different images, only one of which was correct and and was the last option that appeared.

Which brings us now to the home page. I went on a browser wander last night looking at the home page from different machines. This is as it appeared on my Mac on Safari, with all caches and data cleared:

Inline images 9

and on chrome:

Inline images 10

This was the same image displayed on my old Mac with an old version of Safari, my iPad, and a PC running Windows XP with no previous browsing history of this site on Internet Explorer, chrome and firefox all. This was after updating the front page as per your instruction going through the widgets doorway. On checking the site (I open a new tab on Firefox on my iMac), I was met with this:

Inline images 11

A nicely updated page with updated ad, but if you look closely there are two new entries under “emw news” – these were done last week, so the homepage I am seeing on all the other browsers/machines I am looking at are at least two weeks old (what do you see Sam?). Click on the news link and the “new” recipes appear there. This seems to be a homepage frozen in time, and it’s not doing the business any favours. I am now in the habit of checking the emw website on any computer that I happen to be on in the vain hope that it might have updated. With the WP editor seeming to point to an updated site, this surely a hosting issue clamping up the homepage? Where is it being hosted? Outer Mongolia? Or some god-foresaken server farm in a Carolina of the north or south? Either way it is a helluva long way from New Zealand. If it is hosted by the latter one of the Carolinas, might I suggest a strongly worded letter with the word “litigation” sprinkled through it, nothing gets the US off its arse quicker than threatening to call in the lawyers.

I don’t want to sound like a whinger here, but I feel like I am working on this site to very little effect, and very little benefit to the client. I hope that this new email newsletter setup will not lead to increased frustration – I can’t really charge the client for the extra time taken with these double-back and re-do processes.

Rant over

G