Website Very Slow : How to Diagnose the Issue

[Number3]

Hello,

I have a website using Wordpress CMS (theme enternews).

I noticed that it gets a lot of speed issues and sometimes does not even load, which hurts my rankings. The website gets around 50K a month organic traffic atm, but has been losing speed. It grew fast, but it seems that the more it grew, and the bigger the problem became.

I especially noticed issues whenever I have comments help up in the queue, or have not emptied the cache (not even sure that is a good idea to do so, it just seems to fix indexing issues). Basically, it seems like it struggles to load every two or three days I don't touch it.

I am more of a content guy, and I have very little experience on the technical side, so any help is welcome. I am not necessarily looking for a handout as much as I want to find somewhere I can get enough feedback to understand the issue. Ideally, someone to look at the site.

At this point, I realize I am just clicking buttons hoping something works and ultimately achieving nothing.

Could this be a server issue? The website is hosted in the US, where it gets about 20% of its traffic, and the rest is from EU. It's also with Hostgator.

Any help is much appreciated.

[Brett_Tabke]

I would start with the server as the culprit.

Shared Hosting, VPS, or Bare metal server?

• If shared - you are kinda getting what you pay for. Wordpress is not great in shared hosting.
  
• If VPS server, maybe you don't have enough memory?
  
• if bare metal server, you shouldn't be having any issues.
  

Thoughts:

• get super cache for Wordpress. It will reduce overall system load.
  
• see what some of the website testing/seo tools on the web say. They can find quite a few issues.
  
• look closely at any 'plugins' that have been installed. If you can deactivate some that are noncritical, you can often find problems with them if the site starts to work ok.

[Dimitri]

Peace first, then ...

Like mentioned above, sounds like capacity limited server.

Which kind of hosting do you have? Shared? With which kind of guaranteed (or not) resources?

I never used Wordpress, but, if it runs background tasks, may be some of them are hanging in memory or crashing, and slowing down the server.

Do you have access to some kind of error logs ?

Ideally, you should get a VPS, that is guaranteed resources, or a dedicated server, but this would be oversized for your actual usage. However, this requires some kind of technical knowledge, but today, the control panel installed with VPS or dedicated server can let you do a lot of things, easily .

Using the Dev tool of Chrome/chromium, there is a network tab. You can check it, to see if this is the main page, which is long to "start" downloading, and "be" downloaded, or if this is external resources which are blocking everything.

[engine]

Sometimes, something simple such as google's pagespeed test is a helpful tool to point at the obvious. [pagespeed.web.dev...]

[robzilla]

Definitely install a caching plug-in like WP Super Cache or W3 Total Cache. It will ease the burden on the server and can speed up pages significantly. I never run WordPress without one. Might be enough to fix your issue. Upwards of 1500 uncached WordPress requests* is quite a lot on a shared hosting plan, so you're possibly being throttled for your resource consumption (depending on your plan).

* Probably a lot more because your "organic traffic" does not include bots.

This is assuming your host doesn't already take care of server-side caching for you, of course.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

100% - if the site is hosted in a shared environment the time to first byte is going to be slow for a wordpress site. The two options you have for speeding it up are A) switching to a VPS or better hosting plan and B) using aggresive caching that doesn't require many database requests.

In shared environments the database queue is often the speed bottleneck for wordpress sites.

I just wanted to add, since we're naming caching plugins, there is a 3rd option to the two mentioned above. It's called WP-Optimize. It has an excellent wordpress caching system, an independent css minifying system and a database management and cleanup tool built into one plugin. Highly recommended.

If upgrading the hosting is not an option you will NEED a wordpress caching system or visitors will randomly get extremely long page load speeds.

Additional tips if better hosting is not an option, strip the site to it's bare bones. Use the fewest plugins possible besides caching(and backups if you use a plugin to make them), remove as much 3rd party code as you can(I've seen some remove analytics just to gain a few milliseconds) and get in the habbit of optimizing your database to remove revisions and other non-critical database entries.

You should be doing these things even on a fast hosting plan, look at it as a learning opportunity.

Good luck.

Edit: You mentioned US hosting for mostly EU traffic, have you tried a free CDN service to serve your pages locally? They will cache the entire page and serve it for you if you set it up that way.

[Kendo]

I see some client sites with 30+ plugins installed. So first thing to try is deactivate all plugins that are not needed.

Also, a change of theme can improve speed dramatically. Not naming any in particular but I do see that some themes come with a lot of baggage.