How could I test (suggest me the test techniques, or what to test) if the latest version of Wordpress (4.1) is stable for building a company presentation website?
this is more like a kind of assignment, not something real that I have to conduct.
my initial thoughts: the platform is already released, so I would suggest making "domain testing", testing for boundaries and testing for high loads on the system... what do you guys think?
thank you!
For stability testing on the Wordpress you can use some useful tools:
1. WebPageTest
This is one of the most helpful tools available online to help you test the performance of your website. It runs your site from multiple locations around the globe using real browsers and at real consumer connection speeds.
The only disadvantage this site is that you sometime have to wait in queue for other tests to be completed.
http://www.webpagetest.org/
2. Pingdom
Pingdom speed testing is not only free, but also gives you full information about your site’s performance including load time, page size, and a detailed analysis of page. You can also measure how much time it takes to load all the elements on a specific page, you can then use that information to speed up your website.
Other features include testing from multiple locations, performance grade & tips, ability to share the results with your friends, and more.
Apart from all the great features, Pingdom also saves your performance history, so you can review it later and see how things change over time.
http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/
3. GTMetrix
Another great tool for measuring your site’s performance and fantastic tool to have in your arsenal. This site not only gives you all the useful information you need to develop a faster and more efficient website, but also compresses the images that are slowing down your site for you.
This feature is quite useful, but if you have a ton of images, then you would be better off with Smush.it WordPress plugin.
http://gtmetrix.com/
Also you can use WordPress Split Testing Tools.
If you’re using WordPress, then it’s worth considering a tool designed specifically for the platform. While some of the tools in our last roundup (such as Google Content Experiments and Optimizely) also work with WordPress, here are a few more.
1. AB Press Optimizer
AB Press Optimizer allows you to test variations of page elements such as images and buttons and content, such as headlines and text on a self-hosted WordPress site. To use it, you need the plugin plus the ability to use shortcodes (though you can use PHP if you wish).
You can run and get real time reporting on unlimited experiments with unlimited visitors for the $39 personal license, though you will have to upgrade if you want additional support.
https://abpressoptimizer.com/
2. AB Theme Testing
If you’re running a WordPress site, sometimes you need to get back to design basics and test a couple of themes. That’s where AB Theme Testing is useful. It integrates with Google Analytics so you can see your data in your Analytics account. This plugin costs $19. The developers have used it to tweak their own site, as this case study shows.
https://premium.wpmudev.org/project/ab-theme-testing/
3. Simple Page Tester
Simple Page Tester says it’s an SEO friendly plugin that allows users to setup quick split tests. It works well with caching plugins and is available for free. You’ll need to upgrade to premium to work with custom post types, PHP template tags, Javascript and shortcodes and to get more in-depth analytics.
https://simplepagetester.com/
Related
I am trying to speed up my wordpress site. In this case, it is powered by Visual Composer. We have attempted to speed up the site using smaller images, static text, and CDN-movement of movies.
However, I am being told by a service that Visual Composer is the main culprit on why the website is extremely slow. I have no idea how to begin troubleshooting this, and I am asking this group if anyone has had this told to them and what they did about it.
My Site is https://www.trekfederation.com/
Anything to start with would be greatly appreciated.
You shouldn't use Visual Composer. Have a theme custom made so you don't have extra bloat in your site. Visual Composer creates plugin madness and bloats your database. Its not a quick process but making a brand new theme or starting with one of WordPress's themes and making it your own is your best bet. You could also hire someone to do it.
I too was curious about the same question and could not find a reasonably satisfactory answer to my question and so I decided to test the results with and without VC using https://gtmetrix.com/
Following are the results:
Speed before creating the page; using Visual Composer:
Speed of page; when created with Visual Composer:
There is a drastic fall in the speed; having said that; if you tend to use Visual composer some of the premium themes; which have been optimized for VC, you will not face such issues. Wowmall is one such theme on themeforest; which has a decent speed. They do use VC and also provide it free with the purchase of their theme.
Here is the checklist I follow to make sure my WordPress sites do not slow down.
Test the themes well before implementing them on the live project (generally use https://gtmetrix.com/ https://tools.pingdom.com/ https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
Use Max CDN for content delivery network https://www.maxcdn.com/
Use w3 total cache plugin https://wordpress.org/plugins/w3-total-cache/ (I stick to free version; unless I expect high traffic on the website)
Use a minimum number of plugins; it's very tempting to use some plugin to get things done quickly however it may backfire in terms of speed.
PS: you can consider https://wpengine.com/ for hosting solution; I have not personally used their services, however, know that they take care of caching needs quite effectively.
EDIT:
I have also observed the Revolution slider script slow down the website, whether or not the slider is used on the page; the js runs once the plugin is activated.
To conclude Wordpress is a double-edged sword; if not wisely used will result in a poor web performance.
Okay, so this turned out to be fairly curious - I was able to figure out what the developer has done to trick Google Page Speed (and me).
I have attached a screenshot.
He checked for user-agent-string for Google Page Speeds Lighthouse and then shows it a screenshot of a website instead of the website itself. He even shows separate screenshots for mobile and desktop and has added some CSS animations to make the loading seem more realistic.
So there is this benchmark at http://sven.webiny.com/benchmark-webiny-vs-wordpress-vs-drupal-vs-joomla-vs-tomatocms/
Can I really trust it? I mean it came as a surprise to me that Drupal is so much faster than Wordpress and Joomla. I always thought of it as a super heavy CPU devouring monster compared to the aforementioned.
That benchmark is like comparing a train with a plane. Yes, a plane is faster, but that doesn't mean that you should take a plane to commute to work.
A CMS is just a tool, and you need the tool that is most suitable for your project. There is a huge difference between a corporate brochure (5 pages, little interaction, no logged in users), a blog (100 pages, some interaction, some logged in users) and a community platform (10000 pages, lots of interaction, most users logged in). I think every CMS in that benchmark can be the top performer for a specific type of site.
Benchmarking stock installs of these three CMSes is useless. No one uses them without additional modules (which often have major performance implications), and anyone competent is going to set up performance enhancers like caching.
Do note, also, that the CMS that comes out on-top for every benchmark category is the blog author's own project.
Wordpress with a caching plugin would be just as fast.
Put NGINX in front of the webserver, and what CMS you use is immaterial. The site will be much faster.
Put your site's static assets on a CDN, and even better.
WP is easy to work with and expand. Drupal takes a gazillion modules and many queries per page. Both have excellent caching modules.
This is 2011. Not 1999. Frontend "performance" of a website to a visitor has very little to do with the backend. Movable Type would be the fastest of all of these because it writes out plain HTML files, but who wants to use the archaic CGI technology with limited plugins.
I have to say I'm a big fan of Joomla. If you're new to CMS, Joomla has much
less of a learning curve - and despite statements to the contrary - is just as
capable as Drupal for running large/popular sites. But choosing a proper CMS
depends on your experience level and the time you have to spend on the project.
To know more about the differences among your mentioned CMSs refer to
Comparison of Top 3 CMSs: WordPress vs Drupal vs Joomla. There you can get
the detailed info in a simple format.
I need to develop a newspaper site in Drupal, I've already played around with Drupal a little, and I think I know which modules would best suit my purposes. Naturally, one of the modules I'll be needing to use most is Views, but I have a couple of questions:
Because this is a content-intensive site, I was wondering if using 5-6 views on each page to generate node teaser + thumbnail lists would impact performance adversely?
I am a designer with significant front-end development experience. Like I said I've played around with Drupal quite a bit and other than running into a few hurdles which I eventually overcame, for the most part I was able to get it to do what I needed it to. Having said that, does one also need strong programming skills to fully develop a site in Drupal?
Thank you very much for your help!
Jane
Views offers caching and Drupal also has block caching, which should help you improve performance. The SQL that Views generates is never as good as handwritten SQL, but if you make simple Views, the SQL is actually quite good and not a performance problem (unless you have millions of page views).
If you can create the features you need, with modules from Drupal.org, you don't need strong developer skills. But you do need to know some PHP to make a Drupal theme which is what controls the layout of the site. It will also be a great help, in understanding the Drupal theming system, but not a requirement.
First off, check out openpublishapp.com for a Drupal distro that is made for publishers from the ground up, it's pretty hot.
To answer your questions:
1) As far as performance and views goes, having 5-6 views on a page is a normal requirement for a drupal news site and the performance issues are usually handled by views/panel cache, and using a page cache like Varnish in front of a web server, Object caches like Memcached (for the DB) and opcode caches like APC...if you don't want to learn all that off the bat you should still be fine if your traffic isn't too intense (but go sign up at getpantheon.com for awesome hosting with all of that and the kitchen sink, and check out groups.drupal.org/pantheon)
2) If the functionality exists by way of core/contrib modules, to fully develop a site for the most part one only needs to understand enough PHP to theme, and often with starter themes like Fusion, and some of the others you hardly even need that, just an understanding of how they work and are extended (which is well documented). That said, if you want functionality that doesn't exist, you'll have to code it, or have someone code it for which strong programming skills are desired, but not necessarily required :)
Even I recommend the use of the OPENPUBLISH - https://www.acquia.com/solutions/publishing
On top of to this you can make an efficient usage of
1. APC - PHP byte-code caching
2. Drupal Caching - block/template/view level caching
3. Boost - Caching module which doesn’t need any external tools
4. Varnish - HTTP accelerator
5. Memcache - Data intensive content.
Apart from this you will also need to think effectively on deciding on DEPLOYMENT ARCHITECTURE of the site - preferably Acquia or Amazon environment.
Learning curve may vary depending on your current skills in PHP or Drupal. Usage of already established distribution like OPENPUBLISH may help you to minimize the dependability on too much custom coding.
I'm working at a company that uses Drupal 6 to host documentation for it's SAAS products. The documentation is organized in various books using Book.module.
We have a Production Drupal site with the documentation for the production SAAS product.
Secondly, we have a "Preview" site, for the upcoming version of our product - the documentation is slightly different than on the Production site.
Thirdly, we have a "Development" site, which contains the unstable version of our product documentation. The documentation here changes frequently
Documents are originally authored on Development, moved to Preview, and then finally to Production.
It's quite unwieldy to manually update each Drupal site as our product evolves. I've looked at Deploy.module, and although it looks promising, it has limitations wrt books (ie: it can't handle the book structure/menus). It also makes for a solution that is quite complex with lots or moving parts.
I'm hoping that I've been over-thinking everything and some Drupal rockstar out there can point out an obvious (or not-so-obvious) solution.
(An obvious non-drupal solution would probably just be store the documentation pages as html in version control and update each site with the appropriate revision. But with this I lose the ACL functionality that Drupal is so good at.)
Thoughts?
Cheers
I've had good luck with the Feeds module to get one site to consume a certain view from another site when I choose or periodically. It will take some configuration work to get going but it's more flexible than a turn-key solution and it's less fragile than any SQL dump -> import of the node revisions table.
I work at a non profit and we are looking for a web solution to do the following:
External facing web site
Internal posting board for news, updates, pictures
Entitlements around user content
One of the folks at the non profit is a mac person and suggests using iweb and mobileme for this functionality. i have no expereince with these tools but it seems like the following are more appropriate:
TikiWiki: http://info.tikiwiki.org/tiki-index.php
Drupal: http://drupal.org/
Joomla: http://www.joomla.org/about-joomla.html
i am a windows dot net guys so i also would prefer some asp.net solution here but i want to avoid getting religious here as any solution that does the job should be fine.
my question is, are there any thing to be concerned about with using the iWeb and mobileme solutions or any brick walls we are going to run into.
Also, are there PC based solution that will allow you to use these tools or does everyone need a mac?
This is only a partial answer to a multi-part question, but:
Drupal and Joomla are platform-independent. The software itself runs on PHP (presumably on a server, rather than a workstation), but you interact with the systems via a web interface. Drupal in particular lets you choose from many different editing options, via it's Wysiwyg module.
Personally, I think Drupal is an outstanding choice for nonprofit org (this being my own background) that have tech-skilled staff, and Joomla is an outstanding fit for nonprofits that don't have much in-house web expertise.
As for iWeb and MobileMe:
Compare them to Adobe Contribute. They're good software for what they do, but building organizational websites is not what they do.
What you've got is basically a souped-up MS Word that writes W3C compliant HTML. Things like members-only content, interactivity, etc are going to be pretty difficult to manage, and you'll be looking for another solution soon anyway if your site gets larger than a few dozen pages.
In short - avoid iWeb and MobileMe for this type of implementation. You may have a "Mac person" in the office (for now), but these products are designed more for individual/home use and not businesses/organizations. Eventually you'll run into any number of "brick walls".
A few other options (amongst many) if you don't have a web-designer on staff and want a hosted solution would be to look at Wordpress or Squarespace.
Thanks