We have recently upgraded the OM4 platform to include the lastest WordPress (2.8 and 2.8.1) features.

There are quite a few improvements, including:

• A much faster dashboard interface
• A new drag-and-drop sidebar widgets interface
• New screen options on every dashboard page (the tab at the top right)
• Improved timezone support with automatic daylight savings time adjustment
• Support for more than one image gallery on a single page
• and many more

The full list of over 180 new features, changes upgrades and improvements can be found here.

Our Own Performance Benchmarks

Our own before and after testing has demonstrated an average of a 55% decrease in dashboard page load times:

• Main Dashboard
  • Before: 50 file requests,  366KB total file size
  • After: 13 file requests,  167KB total file size
• Write Post Screen (with visual editor and kitchen sink enabled)
  • Before: 108 file requests,  774KB total file size
  • After: 23 file requests,  340KB total file size
• Manage Pages Screen
  • Before: 16 file requests,  289KB total file size
  • After: 11 file requests,  173KB total file size

We hope these performance improvements make administering your website a much more enjoyable task.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask below or post your question on our forums.

WordPress 2.8 Upgrade: Improved Dashboard Performance and Widgets

There have been a few reports recently about the WordPress dashboard sometimes responding slowly. This was occurring for some of our OM4 WordPressMU client sites.

Occasionally a dashboard page load could take up to 15-30 seconds to complete. This is much longer than a typical page load, and could be quite frustrating.

The problem was caused by a bug in WordPress MU – we’ve applied a fix to our platform because it was so annoying but the problem is due to be fixed in the next version of WordPress MU (2.7.1) as well.

We’re always on the lookout for performance issues with our OM4 WordPress sites and fix them if they occur. So if you notice any problems, please let us know.

Intermittent WordPress dashboard performance problems resolved

We’ve all had the experience of a web page seeming to take too long to respond.  Sometimes the website is slow, sometimes your internet connection is slow …

But if the website is your own, it is easy to worry that there is A PROBLEM and that perhaps visitors to your website are also finding it slow. Or worse still, just can’t get to it at all.

If this happens, there are a few URLs you can bookmark that will help give you peace of mind (or if not, give you some good information to help you ask for support).

If you would like to know the response time for your website from the US, Europe or Australia, use WebSitePulse. You can choose to run your test from each of these three geographies. Your website server is hosted in one of those regions, so the response from that region will probably be faster.

Here is the response time report for OM4.com.au as tested from WebSitePulse’s Brisbane server:

If all you want is the time taken to load your website from the US try iWebTool. Just enter your URL and you’ll get the response time.

If you want to see the US response time with all the gory details of how long each component takes to load (the basic web page, the images, the style sheets) in technicolor detail then Pingdom is for you.

Is your site slow or fast? Well, pick some other sites and do a comparison using the same tool. Keep in mind where the site is hosted can have a significant bearing on the relative speed. So if you want to compare to your own site, use the WebPulse tool and use the correct region.

Google’s US search page loads in 0.6 sec from the US. If you can find anything that beats that, you are doing well. Amazon’s home page loads in 6 sec from the US, and this is clearly fine for running an online business.

At least with these test links you never need to wonder if your website is slow or not!

Running a Website Speed Test