Steven Zahm@ Richard
I’m going to reply here rather than the email so there is record for me to refer in the future.
I installed Headway on my dev site and did not see the increase in page load times you were experiencing. So Was pretty certain at that point that there was no conflict between the theme and Connections…
Looking at the Headway settings, the Asset Caching and Dependency Query Variables were disabled. The the gzip Compression was enabled. This is fine but there was also a plugin, GZip Ninja Speed Compression, was installed. These basically do the same thing and I suspect was “clashing”. I deactivated the plugin.
This provided an improvement, be only very slight. Moving on…
I suspected that maybe the caching plugin that was installed might be conflicting with the asset caching provided by the theme, I deactivated it. There was really no improvement. I left it deactivated because the settings were not optimal and I think they were slowing down the site.
Moving on again…
I inspected the wp-config.php… Here I noticed a few issues.
- WP_DEBUG was set to true, the prevents Headway from caching its assets.
- CONCATENATE_SCRIPTS was set to false. It is very highly recommended this not be set as it can slow down the admin. It should only be set if there are admin javascript issues.
With these corrected, you now have about 2 second page load times… and this is without using a cache plugin. I recommend that you not use the ones you have installed. W3TC is great, but really requires it to be tuned to the server to be of benefit. Maybe it is just me, but I never did have much luck with WP Super Cache on Bluehost.
Now, why did simply activating Connections with none of these fixes in place cause big slow downs… duno. For some reason Headway took forever under this configuration to generate its CSS files. Maybe it was just the straw that broke the camel’s back???
Hope this helps!