Hundreds of posts slowing down site?

  • ajcreate

    (@ajcreate)


    4 years ago

    I have recently taken on an existing site for a client. It’s a news website so it has hundreds and hundreds of posts with images. There is pagination for categories etc. The database is so big that I haven’t managed to get it running locally yet.

    One thing they have mentioned is that the more articles they post, the slower the site gets. It’s gradually getting slower and the speed rating is not good. They can’t really remove the old posts as the older posts are still getting lots of hits.

    Is this possible for the number of posts to slow down the site speed?

    Note: It’s currently running on the Newspaper theme. The client is going through the process of manually optimizing images and wants to avoid an image optimizer plugin.

    When I run speed test I’m told there are 17 external sripts which I think could be the problem instead?

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
  • Moderator James Huff

    (@macmanx)

    There are quite a few big sites on WordPress https://www.ads-software.com/showcase/ so it’s not the number of posts slowing it down.

    This may be a plugin or theme conflict. Please attempt to disable all plugins, and switch to the default Twenty Twenty theme. If the problem goes away, enable them one by one to identify the source of the problem.

    If you can install plugins, install Health Check. On the troubleshooting tab, you can click the button to disable all plugins and change the theme for you, while you’re still logged in, without affecting normal visitors to your site.

    Moderator bcworkz

    (@bcworkz)

    There are indeed very large sites that run quite quickly, but their site’s hardware and software has likely been optimized for the site. Throwing hundreds of thousands of posts into a DB provided by a budget shared hosting plan could impact the site’s performance. However, that’s usually not the problem. You need to find where the bottleneck is and focus on widening it so it’s no longer a restriction.

    External scripts do take a small amount of time to fetch, but again, that’s usually not the problem. However, what those scripts do may or may not slow down the site, depending on what the script actually does. Besides following the recommendations of page speed tools, use your browser’s network developer tool to help you identify where the slowdowns are occurring.

    If you haven’t yet done so, I recommend you utilize a caching plugin of some sort. Such plugins sometimes also optimize certain data like CSS and JS files. If the one you like doesn’t do so, separate optimization plugins are available.

    Thread Starter ajcreate

    (@ajcreate)

    Thank you both for the suggestions, I appreciate it. I haven’t installed Health Check yet but I will look into doing that when I am back on that project.

    Caching has seemed to help slightly. I have also tried the Hummingbird plugin and tried a few settings there to optimize the site. It’s made a bit of progress in terms of page speed, especially using gzip, although it’s still very slow for mobile. Some of the main culprits are the scripts for reCaptcha (can’t remove that), tagDiv and wpBakery (these are part of the theme). I think a new theme could be best.

    We have also had numerous hosting issues the past few days and I think the hosting provider is playing a bigger part than I thought.

    Thanks

    Moderator bcworkz

    (@bcworkz)

    FWIW, you only really need reCAPTCHA on pages that have forms that have some downstream impact like contact forms. Search forms and the like not so much. Depending on how reCAPTCHA script was added, it may be possible to have it only load on certain form pages. If you can avoid having such a form on your front page and suppress loading of reCAPTCHA there, it’ll at least speed up that page.

    Thread Starter ajcreate

    (@ajcreate)

    Hi @bcworkz, thanks for the info. They have a “subscribe to newsletter” section on their homepage that they would like to keep. This is the section that uses the reCAPTCHA. I am wondering now if there is a way (plugin maybe) to enter the details and have recaptcha on popup. Then maybe the script could be called on popup if possible.

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
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