Very slow loading times

  • Resolved jason559

    (@jason559)


    1 year, 8 months ago

    I’m volunteering with a non profit that has a WordPress/Elementor site that is extremely slow. (20-30s for first-time page load if the server has been idle for > 20s or so) and 6-9s page load after that. We moved this WP install to it’s own virtual server, to give it 100% access to resoureces. The CPU usage is below our allocated lightsail CPU percentage.

    We have installed Jetpack and also tried W3TC. Neither seems to make much difference.
    Google page speed reports 33 on the perforamnce score.

    Our website plugins were reduced to only our calendar plugin, templates and cache plugin.

    Issue does not occur with static HTML pages. I also tested a plain PHP pages and those also loaded fast. The issue is somewhere with WordPress.

    So – how can we get our site loading times fixed/diagnose?

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

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

  • Standard process would be first to check tools / health check for any obvious issues.


    Then test with default theme and no plugins
    , switch to your theme then switch on plugins one by one.

    You can do this without impacting the front end using https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/health-check/

    This will give you an idea if it is the theme, Elementor, Modern Event Calendar Lite.

    Th enext step is to use a plugin called Query Monitor https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/query-monitor/

    A guess ( as for me it was the Events pages that loaded slow, is it is MEC. You could ask MEC support directly ( that plugin is no longer support on WP Org so you need to go to them direct https://support.webnus.net/support/home )

    Definately something wrong, maybe a datyabse issue like a missing or corrupt index. But from here thatis just guess work.

    Hope that helps a bit.

    You can also try right clicking and going to your inspector. You have a tab called network. If you click on it, It will show the load times of everything that being uploaded to the site. You can refresh the browser to start from scratch.

    It should give you an ideal if something is uploading slowly.

    • This reply was modified 1 year, 8 months ago by mrtom414.
    Thread Starter jason559

    (@jason559)

    @alanfuller I tried health check but ended up just disabling all plugins and went to 2022 theme for testing. Google pagespeed didn’t change, not did my perceived loading time.

    I’m not exactly sure how to read the Query Monitor results?

    Site health does report these two:
    Page cache is not detected and the server response time is slow
    You should use a persistent object cache

    Although, our prior host did not have those pop up and was still dreadfully slow, so unsure if those are the cause.

    speed insight points toward your images and styles cause an issue. The images are taking 7.03s to load consider compression them try using an image compressor like https://squoosh.app/. It free and sometimes it can compress images sizes as much as 70%. Also, you are loading font awesome. It slowing down your loading time by 1s.

    • This reply was modified 1 year, 8 months ago by mrtom414.
    Thread Starter jason559

    (@jason559)

    I assume it is Elementor related, but when enabling plugins that auto convert photos to WebP, it ignores them and always loads the full sized png images. So I had to go in and update to the WebP versions manually.

    To update, I found that installing W3 Total Cache brought our speed times up, as did WP asset clean up because we had multiple js files loading for plugins that are not active on the homepage, but are on their respective pages.

    Now we’re up to a “91” for desktop on PageSpeed. Unfortunately our mobile score is still only “37”.

    • This reply was modified 1 year, 8 months ago by jason559.
Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
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