I think I have finally ironed out all the problems with Irreal. Ironically, the latest snafu held the key to resolving all the other problems. WordPress now automatically updates minor versions and although they notify me with an email, it pretty much flies under the radar. After the last automatic update, comments stopped working and after a bit of debugging I discovered that the NuCaptcha plugin was having problems with the Twenty Ten theme that Irreal uses.
Although I keep the WordPress software up-to-date, having learned my lesson the hard way, I didn’t keep the theme up-to-date because I didn’t think it had security or operational implications and because I had made some tweaks to the CSS. That finally bit me in the butt when comments stopped working. I thought. Actually, I think it had significant negative impact long before that.
After I fixed the comment problem by adding a Child Theme with my custom CSS tweaks, I noticed that the latency problem completely disappeared. I disabled the caching plugin and I still had near-instantaneous page loading. It appears that the loading latency problem was somehow related to the out-of-date theme.
I think I’ve finally learned my lesson: keep all your software current. If you’re running a WordPress site, it’s imperative that you keep WordPress and your theme up-to-date. Updating WordPress means you have to (or at least should) backup your database. Updating your theme is even easier. If you want to change the CSS you should do it by creating a child theme. That’s easy and you only have to do it once. Thereafter, you just need to update the theme when WordPress tells you a new one is available.
Please let me know if you experience any problems with the site. It should load quickly and be fully functional. If it falls short in any way, I’d like to know about it.