Case Study – Counselling Tutor
Online Continuing Education, London, GB
eLearning Success Story / Counselling Tutor
Counselling Tutor Seamlessly Serves Over 30K Members After Joining Pressidium
Counselling Tutor is dedicated to enhancing the practice of counseling and psychotherapy. With a prominent LearnDash website boasting over 30,000 members and 200 active courses, Counselling Tutor plays a pivotal role in providing educational resources to a vast audience.
“We have nothing but praise for the way you have performed since we moved to Pressidium. We have had no outages due to resources since, and the speed particularly when carrying out admin tasks, has significantly improved.”
Colette Kelly
CTO Counselling Tutor
Colette is the Administration Support Manager of Counselling Tutor. Colette’s role involves addressing performance challenges on the LearnDash website and providing technical support and automation services.
Counselling Tutor encountered persistent performance challenges with their website. Previous hosts struggled to handle the problem, resorting to substandard workarounds such as server throttling to manage resource consumption. Moreover, Counselling Tutor constantly encountered slow and often unhelpful support.
“It became clear that without spending significant amounts on increasing PHP worker counts and CPU size, we were unable to improve the situation.
In response to these challenges, Counselling Tutor sought a new and reliable hosting solution that would address these issues and ensure a seamless user experience.
The combination of Pressidium’s WordPress expertise, performance focus, excellent support, and esteemed reputation with LearnDash piqued Counselling Tutor’s interest.
Ultimately, it was Pressidium’s commitment to testing, analyzing, troubleshooting, and resolving these issues that led to Pressidium being selected as the preferred solution.
Pressidium initiates an onboarding project with every new Enterprise customer to ensure a successful transition. Throughout this process, the onboarding team’s engineers conduct thorough load testing, troubleshooting, and optimization for each site that is migrated to the Pressidium platform.
During Counselling Tutor’s transition to the new platform, Pressidium engineers identified and solved the issues, with significant improvements experienced thereafter.
Specifically, during pre-migration stress tests, the system engineering team noted significant delays when loading users.php in the WordPress admin interface.
By investigating MySQL-related performance and health monitoring, Pressidium’s WordPress DevOps engineers discovered that multiple database queries were causing significant delays in page rendering and loading times.
Until these queries completed execution, the site remained unresponsive for up to 114 seconds. That means over 1 minute of time taken for the browser to receive the first byte of data from the server (TTFB).
As a result, the site was extremely slow and non-functional, also experiencing occasional timeouts.
Examining these queries, the team discovered excessive use of Regular Expressions (REGEX) which is suboptimal when used in SQL and causes slow database queries. Moreover, they discovered that these queries store and retrieve user IDs within course metadata, retrieving over 160,000 database rows due to the extensive number of users.
The onboarding team at Pressidium, which also includes WordPress Performance Engineers, then began investigating what triggered the slow queries by tracing the query path backward.
It turned out that the slow queries were executed by ld-users.php — a LearnDash plugin file that enumerates users and their roles. This file contains a conditional statement that checks for the use of the legacy course access list, which holds and retrieves user IDs allowed to access certain courses.
This legacy feature maintains backward compatibility with older data structures of the LearnDash platform. If this option is activated, the code assesses whether the data structure aligns with the current system version; if it’s outdated, a REGEX-based query is executed, leading to the slowdown. Conversely, if the data structure is up-to-date, a more efficient code section is used, significantly enhancing performance.
Armed with this insight, the Pressidium team determined that they should try using the “Convert Course Access Lists” option in the “Data Upgrades” settings that LearnDash LMS provides in its admin screen. This option’s purpose is to convert legacy data to the newer structure and hopefully mitigate the latency issue.
The team set up a cloned testing environment and implemented the necessary changes, including the conversion of course access lists on the test pages. This intervention significantly enhanced the execution speed of users.php, reducing the delay to 1.36 seconds.
This improvement resulted in a page load time 84 times faster, with no timeouts.
After verifying the results, Counselling Tutor was informed about the impressive post-migration improvements and subsequently proceeded to launch the site on the new platform.
Pressidium’s activation of this setting drastically improved site performance, resolving the underlying issue without compromising functionality.
The issue may possibly have been identified earlier through conventional support channels directly with LearnDash. However, pinpointing the cause of such a problem is extremely complex and presents a significant challenge that may even exceed the capabilities of these support teams.
Addressing these issues demands advanced performance and health monitoring, deep WordPress expertise, and strong collaboration and communication from the engineering team. Pressidium went beyond quick fixes, such as resource boosts, and opted to identify the root cause, and permanently resolve the issue.
This proactive approach distinguished Pressidium’s support from past providers. An achievement that undoubtedly surpassed Counselling Tutor’s expectations.
The support provided by Pressidium and the focus on matching the platform setup to our specific needs has been far superior to any we have had in the past.
We would have no hesitation in recommending Pressidium to other LearnDash users.
