How to diagnose a slow WordPress site?

Hi macdonjo. If you click the “Performance Grade” tab it will give you the specific items you can address.

There are also several other services that will analyze your site, including:
https://www.webpagetest.org/
https://gtmetrix.com/

You can find more suggestions in the articles referenced in this search.

Yeah, the site has 80+ performance grade on most pages, but still takes over 6 seconds. That doesn’t narrow it down to who’s to blame. That’s just basic front end stuff.

It’s your web site. It’s up to you to make the choices on shared vs managed hosting, caching, image compression, CDN and the various other aspects that affect site loading speed. There is no easy fix; it takes analysis of the results that the test sites give you plus action to improve those aspects of your site.

How can I find out if the host is the problem?

If you look at the Pingdom results Page Analysis tab it will show you how much time is spent waiting on the host.

This article discusses using ping and traceroute. It’s written by a specific host vendor but the procedures can be used by anyone.

You might take a look at the search results here for some additional information:

Other things you could try:
1. Ask your host to move your site to a different server.
2. Buy a new domain name (less than $5), set up a new host for a month (about $10), migrate your site to the new host and test it there.
3. If you’re on a shared hosting plan consider a VPS or managed WP installation. However, both of those options will be more expensive than shared hosting.

You can also run your site through Google PageSpeed and see if you notice anything that can speed up your site.

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/