Very slowly works site (advise hosting)

Greetings!

It looks like you’re running a Wordpress site. I have some thoughts to share on this. In most cases, the reason for a slow Wordpress site is that people do not realize how heavy their dynamic web applications can be. I will explain.

The transaction for a typical Wordpress site goes like this:

1. Client requests site.
2. Server receives request.
3. Wordpress loads base files, themes, plugins, and then queries the database to determine how to use all of these together to form the website that you made.
4. Wordpress returns finished product to web server.
5. Web server returns headers to visitor.

The most crucial moment here is Step 3. The more that Wordpress has to process, the longer the web server has to wait to receive the finished product so that it can return headers to the visitor. To resolve this, you can try a few things:

1. Remove all unnecessary plugins. Disabled is not the same as removed.
2. Remove all unused themes.
3. Install static caching. Try using WP Super Cache for this.

The lighter the application, the faster it can return it’s finished product. Static caching can mitigate a lot of this by preventing the application from constantly working so hard to return the exact same data to every visitor. Keep in mind that some plugins and themes can render static caching ineffective, and in such cases the only thing that you can really do is try to find out which is the cause and consider an alternate solution.

Now there is one thing I want to address beforehand. I frequently hear as a counter to this knowledge “It wasn’t slow before, so something other than the website must have changed.” I can’t speak to that with certainty, but I can tell you that I’ve witnessed a great deal of sites that simply did not follow this logic. I’ve witnessed websites that were poorly optimized but experienced no problems until that poor optimization compiled over time, until it created a burden so large that it could no longer hold on to it with ease. An example of this: A plugin that monitors visitors (real and robots), compares each one to a database table, and writes each visitor to that same table. The longer that site exists, the slower it becomes, without any external factors. So make sure that you don’t allow any perceived logic of the situation to keep you from testing the web application, this is all too common and tends to lead one down the path of unnecessary spending on the resolution.

Jarland