Reduce initial server response time and speed up Discourse

Product Support

AI-generated summary

The discussion revolves around improving the performance of a Discourse site, howtodiscuss.com, which is experiencing slow server response times and failing Core Web Vitals. Faizan_Zahid shared screenshots and a PageSpeed report highlighting the issues. Simsnet and saquetim pointed out that the ads on the site are causing the slow page loads, with Simsnet suggesting that 4-5 ads per page is excessive.

Falco suggested that the site’s content might be better suited for a blog or CMS, but Faizan_Zahid replied that they need the advanced moderation features offered by Discourse. Faizan_Zahid asked if there’s a way to migrate Discourse to another CMS that supports Google SEO best practices, such as 100% PageSpeed score, Core Web Vitals, AMP, and rich snippets, while also offering powerful features like Discourse.

1

Hi,

We are having issues with Core Web Vitals, we are on latest discourse version 2.9.0.beta1 on our site What Companies are in the Finance Field? - How To Discuss

but our site speed is very slow and its failing all core vitals.

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https://pagespeed.web.dev/report?url=https%3A%2F%2Fhowtodiscuss.com%2Ft%2Fwhat-companies-are-in-the-finance-field%2F32980

We are losing all traffic and SEO rankings and Google is de-ranking us due to slow speed of our discourse site. We need help.

As per https://pagespeed.web.dev/report?url=https%3A%2F%2Fhowtodiscuss.com%2Ft%2Fwhat-companies-are-in-the-finance-field%2F32980 our server response time is slow and site needs server side and client side improvements to pass Core Web Vitals and get 100% pagespeed score.

One of the important things is the initial server response time, our server takes too long to respond and we have approx 250+ online users and our CPU is very powerful in specs, why is this happening , how to fix the speed of our site at client and server?

Site backup is approx 3.3 GB so you can get idea of how big our database is.

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Can anyone please help us speed our our site? Will be happy to sponsor this if needed. Please share your thoughts below or you can inbox me.

Thanks in advance

2

Your Discourse site itself is fine. Albeit the size of the database and assets, it’s pretty decent.

The ads are what’s causing the page speed to be slow. I disabled my adblocker and it took 13-20 seconds to load the page, ads and all.

Not to mention, 4-5 ads on a single page is a BIT overkill, isn’t it? :thinking:

3

I had the same feeling as @Simsnet, the content from Discourse loaded almost instantaneously for me.

The ads on the other hand took a looooong time to load.

4

Looks like your site is not really a internet forum, but more of a collection of articles. I’d suggest using a more appropriate software for your needs, like a blog or a CMS.

5

Other softwares/CMS don’t have advance features like moderation etc so thats why we are with Discourse.

Is there a quick easy way to migrate Discourse to another CMS? Our site totally dependent on Google SEO, so which is the fastest platform which can support all Google Seo best practices like 100% pagespeed score, Core Web Vitals, AMP, Google structured data, rich snippet etc along with powerful features like discourse ?