Page Speed Unusable

What’s the url of your website? I’ll take a look at Pingdom speed test.

Thanks very much Jason, i have sent you the URL in an email

If I had a nickel for every time…

@emilygraham Please do not do that. Support is offered in the forums only, following @jasoncharlesstuartking (who is a fantastic volunteer BTW) and contacting him off of the forums is something that is expressly not allowed.

https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Forum_Welcome#The_Bad_Stuff

I know you want help but please do not do that again.

Really sorry Jan, won’t do it again, hadn’t picked up on that rule. Is there any way of providing a URL privately?

I’m afraid there isn’t. These are public forums and there is no private contact option.

It now takes 15 seconds to load a page

Try this: Use https://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/ and tell us what the initial load for the first request is. For example, if you put in https://www.ads-software.com/news/ you’ll see that the first request completes in 873ms.

Without sharing your URL, how long does that take your site?

Hi Emily,

Plus, if you share the url in the forum, other people might chip in with help!

I’m going to assume you didn’t move the website in the last 48 hours, because otherwise this might simply be an issue with DNS resolving.

I ran a speed test using Pingdom for your site. You only load 70 files, the site’s only 2.5mb yet it took 9 seconds to load. There was an initial wait of 4.5 seconds for the server to respond.

I’m not that knowledgeable about how servers work, so will suggest pouring a strong coffee into it and offering words of encouragement. I don’t know HostPapa so no idea how good a host they are. Sometimes these issues come down to the host’s quality.

Memory limit of 128 should be sufficient. Really this site should not struggle. Probably not anything to do with the migration.

Install a security plugin such as WordFence or Sucuri, just in case you’re getting a lot of login/hack attempts. I’ve had several websites slowed down by this problem, which suddenly got faster once a block was in place.

Thanks for the kind words Jan (the omniscient and omnipresent)

Thanks Jason and Jan, no DNS changes recently and since only moved the website there earlier this week unlikely to be login/hack attempts. The backend is equally as slow too.

Jan, the first request gave the following results (DNS 241ms, Connect 124ms, Send 0ms, Wait 6.72ms, Receive 1ms, Total 7.09ms)

“unlikely to be login/hack attempts” – I still recommend you install a security plugin, I think every site should. You might have moved the website, but it’s still at the same domain right? Even brand new websites can suffer.

A few more ideas and then I think my brain is empty:

Check the MySQL database, what size is it? Optimize it using the phpMyAdmin tool on the hosting control panel.

Reinstall WordPress core files via Dashboard > Updates. Unlikely to help, but why not?

Check the settings on the server using a plugin such as https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/wordpress-php-info/

Check those settings against the requirements to host WordPress – https://www.ads-software.com/about/requirements/.

If they don’t match … reconsider your choice of hosting.

Waiting usually means it’s waiting on one very important file before it can load everything else after it, so looking at the item that goes to load first should point you in the right direction as to what it is exactly that is loading slow. it may sound silly, but have you cleared your browser cache, and/or web cache?

Thanks everyone, Jason i optimized the database earlier in the week, will try updating the core files and running the plugins. The backend is so slow though it takes 15 seconds just to open the plugins menu!

armryan, thanks for your input. The first item that takes 4 seconds to load is the website URL itself!? The other file is theme/css/screen.php file, which is a small file…..

Okay, and may i ask why you switched hosts? Starting to think it could be a host issue, if it’s not the cache that is the problem. What caching plugins do you use?

Just did a quick google, and apparently hostpapa are known for having very slow servers, and then blaming the client for not optimizing properly.

Hi there, just a quick update – during the original migration process, i did come across an issue using updraftplus, which failed since none of the tables had a prefix. Updraftplus were great and updated the database file, but to rule out any of this process causing the speed issue, thought we would re-migrate using duplicator and start again with a clean restore. Again, same issue – during the deployment, duplicator fails with a server code 200 error and the website displays a ‘Your wp-config.php file has an empty database table prefix, which is not supported.’ error. No idea how the tables ended up with no prefix, but this is obviously causing a lot of problems, so am thinking that perhaps this needs to be addressed before we try re-migrating again. The plugins to update the prefix don’t work, since there is no ‘old prefix’, any ideas what the best process is to add in a prefix for the tables, and whether there is any way round this issue?