Hey Seramor
Sorry, the next update will fix the initial results (the will be loaded with page load, and not a seperate ajax request) – so there will be no delay initially.
But queries/searches after the first one using ajax will be the same as you have now.
After doing some tests to your site (using another search form and using the other ajax method) the results are still the same.
Basically, when using a shortcode, the Ajax request creates a new WP_Query with the various parameters of the search – I thought there may be a bug here.
The other way of doing it (without shortcode) uses the filter pre_get_posts to modify your existing query – so both methods are slow.
I would say at this stage it could be a couple of things.
Your header redirects are very slow – so when using ajax, submitting, and redirecting to get results results in a long round trip – I’m not sure what would cause this.
Or
You database is slow, and wordpress queries in general are slow due to some configuration issue.
You do have a lot of posts on your site (although not many for the specific post types you want to search) but the queries on the database are still performed against your full table, and this may be causing performance issues.
One thing I would like you to test (if you can, otherwise I will need to find some time to write it), is to create a new WP_Query, that will search within those post types, with a couple of taxonomy restrictions thrown in there for good measure, and see if this has slow performance. If so, then it is likely a configuration issue or combination of your setup and the way wordpress works.
The only two ways forward (without knowing results to the above test) are to:
Create a clean WP install, install the plugin and do some tests there, on the SAME server environment – so we know how if it possibly something to do with your hosting.
or
Install a caching plugin which will greatly improve database query speeds and in effect the speed your results are loaded.
Let me know if you can do a test with creating a custom WP_Query on your page and the results? You will need to use a combination of the methods described in these links: http://codex.wordpress.org/Class_Reference/WP_Query#Type_Parameters and http://codex.wordpress.org/Class_Reference/WP_Query#Taxonomy_Parameters
Thanks
🙂
