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August 9, 2019 at 12:20 pm

Hi,

The way to speed things up would be to migrate from a cheap shared hosting account to either a VPS or a dedicated server. You could possible add caching but depending on the server it may not make much of a difference.

August 21, 2019 at 3:46 am

I installed the event calendar add-on and added it to the home page of my site. The site now loads very slowly, and I see a gear icon right below the header each time I open the site.

The cog icon is there to give feedback that the calendar is doing something, its needed so that user know something is happening, for example when they go to the next month etc.

Is there a way to speed up the add-on?

Technically it’s not the add-on that needs to speed up, is your server responding to the request to pull the event info into the calendar, the add-on has sent off the request and is waiting for a response which is why the cog icon shows.

First, the shared hosting may be our only option so I would like to find an option where the calendar shortcode doesn’t slow our website down dramatically

The reason it’s loading slowly is the calendar has to pull a lot of information for your events and shared hosting can only do so much, especially if other sites on the server are hitting the DB at the same time.

So your options are either reduce the amount of processing required for the events data, cache the data after its been pulled or update to a ‘better’ host.

Caching can often cause more problems than it solves on ecommerce sites, you have to disable it on EE’s pages (which is what the link you links to for cache exclusion is getting you to do) but it could be used for the calendar, although its going to take some work to set that up.

Another option is to have a calendar page and load the calendar on that page rather than your home page.

Can you enable the add-on so I can take a look?

August 22, 2019 at 8:58 am

Hi there,

It looks like the add-on has been de-activated again unless I’m looking at the wrong site?

August 22, 2019 at 10:06 am

The http version of the above link goes to csjthewell.org so yes I was looking on the wrong site.

The calendar’s initial request is taking 1.26seconds and finishes loading before the rest of your page has loaded, so I’m not sure it’s the calendar slowing down the page.

What’s happening is the calendar assets are loading within the normal flow of the page, then once loaded it queries the DB to pull in the events, during that query it shows the spinning cog.

You can use some CSS to hide the spinning icon on the home page if preferred, I don’t really recommend it gives your users some feedback when clicking the next/prev weeks on the calendar but it is possible to do with some CSS:

.home #espresso-ajax-loading {
    display: none!important;
}

You can add that in Appearance -> Customize -> Additional CSS.