Limited Support
Our support team is currently on holiday from December 25, 2025 to January 7, 2026, and replies may be delayed during this period.
We appreciate your patience and understanding while our team is away. Thank you for being part of the wpForo community!
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays! 🎄
All tables are in InnoDb. It has unfortunately made no difference. Please take a look at this video I made of my forum and wpforo's own forum - both are very slow. My website (the blog part) is very fast as you can see in the video. There are many people having speed issues and as I said Google has flagged 1000 plus forum posts as slow - this is an SEO hazard as you know. @danniee is also saying the same thing. Please, as loyal wpforo users, we ask you to look into this and fix this issue once and for all! I am sure you guys can find a solution. I really do not want to look into other forums as wpforo is excellent.
Here is the video https://streamable.com/e188qa (it will expire in 2 days)
@hbk747 yes, same problem here. My website is ultra optimized. According to GTMetrix it loads in 1.2s but wpforo is a real bottleneck. My forum is slow to post but this forum is even worse for me, so it's not a "local" problem.
I find it odd because wpdiscuz, which I assume is still part of this team, is ultra fast. Commenting is done in milliseconds but when posting on the forum it can take seconds. It's also odd because editing a post is ultra fast, but again, posting is painfully slow.
It needs some serious optimization I believe.
In your case, the issue is related to the email server. Due to a high subscription count, sending emails takes longer and slows down the process. You should install an email queue to resolve this, and you shouldn't face any issues anymore.
@sofy hi, thank you for your response. However, I very much doubt this is the case since it's the exact same thing for me here. Wpforo forum is even slower than my own forum.
@sofy hm, for some odd reason it seems like you guys didn't add much control over the email notifications so apparently code has to be added. Does this still work?
"We may suggest you use the following code:
remove_filter('wpforo_after_add_post', 'wpforo_topic_subscribers_mail_sender', 13);
Just note: in this case, the users will not receive an email for replies even if they've subscribed to this topic.
Users will get an email in case of registration, mentioning, etc. They'll just not receive the emails for the new replies."
I suspect there is some optimization to do here because many forums use email notifications and this is rarely an issue.
@sofy Waiting for your reply. The video has probably expired by now. Should I send it again. Regardless the forum is very slow. Please read the previous post.
@sofy Hello. I am still waiting for a reply to this very pressing issue. Please help!
We've checked your website multiple times and haven't found any issues related to speed. Your website has good performance.
@sofy Please check the OP and the image attached there. Google search console has flagged over a 1000 forum pages. Whenever I go to your forum or mine, the loading bar on the top keeps spinning. This doesn't happen for other pages. Also there are other people who also have a fast website like mine but their forum is slow such as @danniee. Again we could be wrong but Google is not. Slow pages or need improvement pages are bad for SEO. Please take some action as otherwise wpforo is amazing. Please help. I even made a video for you but you didn't see it. If you want I can send it to you again. Please also check the image on the OP.
Also there are other people who also have a fast website like mine but their forum is slow such as @danniee.
In case of @danniee the issue is different. You can find the solution for the user here: https://wpforo.com/community/how-to-and-troubleshooting-2/wpforo-pages-slow-to-load/paged/3/#post-123533
@sofy I am not sure where you are getting this from. And even IF this were the case, I did not activate email subscriptions. Where can I disable it and why is it ON by default?
To be fair, there are plenty of forums where email subscriptions obviously are not an issue. I can't help but feel this is shifting blame on the user.
@sofy This doesnt answer why Google has flagged 1000+ pages of the forum as slow or needs improvement. The fact is that there is a slowness issue with wpforo. I love wpforo. It by far is the best forum plugin but please fix this issue for us. I can send you that video as well where it shows that wpforo continues to load for a long time.
@hbk747 ,
There is no slowness issue with wpforo for sure. In most cases the problem reasons are the following:
- Hosting service issues
- Attacks to the website
- Database optimization issues. Mostly the table indexes, optimizations and repairing.
- Damaged data in the database. Something could be corupted in the database that crash SQL requests or make them very slow
- Conflicts with other plugins. Some plugins could conflict with wpForo and make a lot of problems through WordPress hooks
- External content in wpForo pages. Some users may have avatars with external URLs that laods very slowly. Even the Gravatars can make the wpForo pages very slow. You may have many users using Gravatar or the default one is very slowly loading.
- External content in users signatures or in the post content (videos, images and embedded iframes).
- WordPress Theme configuration and issues with the forum page.
- Disabled wpForo cache or cache conflicts with hosting and WordPress cache.
There is no way to understand the reason of your page slowness by discussing in this forum. This requires a deep debugging directly in your website and server. Unfortunately, this is out of the free support scope. You can do that yoursalfe going through the list above. You can find some WordPress expert to check your system or request for wpForo Pro support.
@robert The thing is my website is super fast. It scores a 100/100 for both mobile and desktop. Please check here: https://pagespeed.web.dev/analysis/https-paradigmshift-com-pk/ggqv3gk87n?form_factor=desktop
So this means that my host is fast, my cache plugin is fast and there are no known clashes with plugins. Also gravatars and signatures on the forum should not be an issue because even threads with JUST ONE POST load slow. Here is proof https://pagespeed.web.dev/analysis/https-www-paradigmshift-com-pk-community-forum-job-search-forum-police-assistant-jobs/7wyvm22psk?form_factor=desktop (46 on mobile and 65 on desktop only). Super bad.
So all the forum pages are slow. Secondly, your own forum is very slow (please watch my video below). I checked your PSI score for the community page and it is not good https://pagespeed.web.dev/analysis/https-wpforo-com-community/5yz4zc51jv?form_factor=desktop
Check my psi score for my forum - it is even worse.
If wpforo's forum pages were fast themselves then I would agree with you that there is something wrong with my website only.
So there is definitely an issue. Here is the video again to prove it (PLEASE watch it because it proves what I am saying) I have sent it 3 times and none of you have seen it.
Thanks!
@hbk747 ,
Please read and check the points from 5-9 I shared. It doesn't matter how fast are your website pages and hosting, if you have the problems listed from 5 to 9 then your forum pages will be slow and that's not wpForo issue.
wpForo is a very lightweight and fast plugin, if it would be such a slow plugin we'll have hundreds of reposts. Almost all reports related to the slowness were the website specific issues. I'm sure yours is also the website specific issue.
