Do I need a VPS for Better Speed?

[Tech4]

Hi everyone. One of my websites has now about 250K pageviews monthly and actually is doing well, but I feel that it is too slow even when I browse through pages and compare the response time and the speed of other websites. I have a nice and fast WP theme, a WP Rocket plugin for caching, use Sucuri with its caching but it seems that the reason of slow performance is my cheap shared hosting. When I disable AdSense on a certain page, Google's pagespeed test shows 75 score for mobiles and 95 for desktops. With AdSense ads I have 25 for mobiles and about 65-80 score for desktops.

The current website is a blog that I update about once a week, I don't use any user authorization and have about 20 comments a week (native Wordpress comments). Please, guide me:
1. Do I need a VPS or I can find a suitable shared hosting?
2. Which hosting should I try?

Thank you in advance!

[not2easy]

Sorry, as stated in the Charter [webmasterworld.com] we do not discuss hosting companies here.

A quick search around the forums for mentions of page speed information shows that without AdSense on your site, it will load much faster, it happens to all sites whether using WP or not. It couldn't do that if the slow speed was due to shared hosting. It happens on my sites, too and the VPS I use is excellent but costs a lot more than shared hosting.

Something to keep in mind:

Google has said that speed is a very small part of the ranking formula. I'm not saying speed isn't important because it does indirectly impacts many important factors. I'm saying that some people worry too much over milliseconds and too little over providing a valuable user experience which tends to have a much greater influence on website success.

- goodroi see [webmasterworld.com...]

See more on this topic:
from 2019: [webmasterworld.com...]
from 2018: [webmasterworld.com...]

[graeme_p]

If Adsense is the problem changing hosting will not help with that.

My only remaining Wordpress site (my personal blog) gets a Pagespeed score of 94 on shared hosting without caching (not bothering with that or any optimisation because I mean to move it to a static site generator at some point).

The problems are usually in the design/theme rather than the backend. Is you theme really fast? Have you looked at what is slow to load using the network tab in a browser's developer tools?

[Tech4]

Excuse me for a wrong question.
I'm not saying my WP theme is the fastest, but there is a thing than bothers me a lot more. When I test my website using Pingdom or isitwp, I see a long "wait" period when loading every item no matter which theme I am currently using. When I test other websites, the "wait" period is much shorter.

[brotherhood of LAN]

On shared hosting you're basically being load balanced and not given specific resources

On a VPS you're at least allocated a certain amount of memory, network bandwidth, perhaps a dedicated CPU, and disk space

On dedicated you have specific hardware resources allocated for just you

Even on a dedicated server you're still likely sharing a network connection with others. For shared/VPS you are more at the mercy of their business model and whether they 'oversell' their resources. There is no single answer to what's the best host and how responsive they can be for any customer or at any time of day. There are some very good shared hosting providers that do the job for any site not requiring large amounts of dedicated resources 24/7, same for VPS providers.

Saying that, I say dedicated > vps > shared, generally because you're paying more for specific resources that otherwise could be allocated to someone else, you're paying for that elasticity of the resources you require that otherwise could be used by someone else.

A long 'wait period' could indicate the server you have lacking the resources to service your request, or it could be that your site is slow in itself. I'd say if you're doing 250K pageviews and you're generating revenue from it, you should consider a VPS or dedicated. You can get some dedicated servers for less than $10/m nowadays. It's not so much the cost, it's more to do with who is 'managing it', i.e. if you can install and maintain a VPS/dedicated server and it's worth the time, then you might prefer doing it that way. If you require 'managed' hosting prepare to pay orders of magnitude more. That's one of the main plus points of shared hosting - they take care of the server management for you.

When it comes to choosing either managed or unmanaged, I'd say choose a provider close to your market, who has good reviews, good support and might not be the cheapest but in the long run costs you less time. Avoid hosts that have only been around for a year or two- there are many that appear and disappear, often at the lower end of the market.

[tangor]

The "you get what you pay for" usually applies ... but more importantly, as @brotherhood of lan indicates above it is the SERVICE and MANAGEMENT of resources that is the key difference in nearly EVERYTHING about response/availability.

HOWEVER, in these days of g chasing "more" there is a very real issue that in making too many changes will have an adverse effect.

When measuring speed measure against USER ENGAGEMENT rather than "can I get more users by shaving micro seconds" ... with a quarter million page views monthly, just how many more do you hope to achieve if you make any substantial changes?

[Brett_Tabke]

Tale of two sites: webmasterworld here gets 99 out of a 100 on Google speed test. Custom optimized Perl (no relational db running - it's pure flat files).

Meanwhile, on the same server is Pubcon.com running big beefy WordPress. It scores in the low 50's with caching enabled and lower without it.

The dedicated server we are on is fairly fast - top-of-line with 64gig ram and ssd's...all the bells.

You can optimize the tar out of Wordpress and the only cure for speed problems is by throwing faster hardware at it.

[phranque]

When I test my website using Pingdom or isitwp, I see a long "wait" period when loading every item no matter which theme I am currently using. When I test other websites, the "wait" period is much shorter.

i believe you are referring to TTFB (time to first byte)

assuming the traffic is fairly steady, 250K pageviews monthly in and of itself shouldn't be a significant load on a server.

i would try turning off your WP plugins one at a time and test each time (remembering to clear browser/server cache, etc each time) to see if one or more plugins is causing a page speed problem.
i recently discovered a chat plugin caused a massive increase in TTFB on a WP site.

[Hoople]

Does a vanilla html page such as the Wordpress example.com/readme.html load quickly? Multiple aspects to question as others have said above.

Does a test install of Wordpress load quickly? What about with a minimalist theme on this install?

Waterfall charts of load times are your friend as it could be inefficient SQL queries in your theme or possibly the SQL server is overloaded.

[graeme_p]

Does a vanilla html page such as the Wordpress example.com/readme.html load quickly?

I think this is the best starting point. Look at that, look at the TTFB for it. You could also try other static files.

[graeme_p]

Meanwhile, on the same server is Pubcon.com running big beefy WordPress.

Pubcon is (I assume) a busy site. The OPs site is only getting 250k monthly page views which averages at only about six a minute.

A small Wordpress site can easily get a page speed score of over 90.

Relational database are unlikely to be the culript - they are very rarely the problem and issues are usually easily fixed. Again a small site running on an RDBMS can get a 100 page speed score without caching. Its almost always in the front end that slows things doen