What changes can I implement to speed up a very slow site?

1. Remove unnecessary plugins
   If your website currently uses numerous plugins, it could potentially be causing a slowdown. To identify the impact of each plugin on your loading speed, start by conducting a baseline test using tools like GTMetrix or Google Pagespeed Insights. Next, systematically deactivate one plugin at a time and rerun the speed test with each deactivation. Although it may be time-consuming, this method helps to find plugins that contribute the most to the slowdown in your site’s loading speed.
2. Enable caching
   When you access a website, specific elements are cached, enabling quicker access and faster loading upon subsequent visits. Caching optimizes the process by reducing the need for your browser to download all resources anew; it only retrieves a select few, enhancing overall loading efficiency.
   
   Enabling caching can significantly enhance your site’s loading speed for returning visitors. Install a plugin such as W3 Total Cache or W3 Super Cache, both of which allow you to activate sitewide caching or cache-specific elements of your site.
3. Optimize and reduce the size of your images
   As you said, most of the speed issues are related to images.
   Ensure that your images are appropriately sized. For instance, if the width of your blog page is 900px, ensure that your images match this width.

Thank you. So I tried to implement some of these, and in the process seem to have done something to mess up the entire site. Before it was slow, but still perfectly functional. Now it’s slow to the point of being unusable, and many images aren’t loading at all. Also, WordPress itself barely functions now, and keeps timing out/disconnecting when I try to edit a post. My internet connection is otherwise fine.

I added Smush (to reduce image size) and “smushed” about 50% of my images, but now a lot of them do not load at all, or only a few load, like this post: https://bastecutfold.com/dark-chocolate-truffles-sparkling-rose/

Hoping @wpmudevsupport13 might be able to weigh in, as Smush seems to be the cause of the problem, or maybe Smush interacting with another plugin?

I added the W3 Total Cache plugin, but then got an error message in Smush that I needed to turn it off. For now I’ve deleted W3 Total Cache, and deactivated Smush. I’ve also deleted or deactivated all but the essential plugins.

What can I do to get my site back to where it was a day ago? I’d rather have slow-ish but functional that what it looks like now.

Does your host have a backup you can restore before you started playing with smush and w3 total cache? If so, do that then….

Use this plugin first: https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/bulk-image-resizer/ it works on the server you host with, simple and quite quick, very efficient too!

Optimising and shrinking your high quality but very large file sized images will help immensely.

You probably want to optimise your hosting next, for a largeish blog a VPS hosted on NGINX or Litespeed with server-side caching would be best. You can also optimise your PHP versions/settings, moving away from a shared host environment (if that’s what you currently have), as other people can hog resources and affect your website! ??

Thank you. I just contacted my host and they weren’t much help, basically said to contact the developer of the plugin. I do use shared hosting and you’re definitely right about changing hosts in the long-term. I’ve had a big increase in website traffic over the past few months and am hoping to monetize, but I really need to get the speed issue resolved first.

Fairly certain it’s Smush (possibly interacting with Jetpack?) which is causing the issue at the moment—I might make a fresh post to see if I can get the developer’s attention. I see there are quite a few older posts from WP users with similar problems, so it seems like a known issue.

In terms of the image resizer plugin, how do I know what size image to use? I’ve been resizing my images (before upload) to max 1500px wide and 72 dpi, but clearly this isn’t small enough. The other comment mentions something about resizing to the width of the page, but I’m not sure how I’d determine that, either?

I would remove smush and use the plugin I suggested to resize images, 800px to 1024px is a good size max width, jetpack also slows down your site as it’s connected outside your webhosting server, so round trips add extra time see? Might be good to examine what plugins you are using and whether you can remove or change them, update them etc. and see how things go.

Thank you! Yes, I’ve deleted Smush. I also removed Jetpack and all other non-essential plugins, so I’m down to the bare minimum. I also used Site Health in troubleshooting mode and as far as I can tell the issue is possibly W3 Total Cache related. Bluehost told me to use this plugin, but now that it’s installed, activating/deactivating doesn’t seem to make much difference. Images do seem to load a little bit faster if I disable lazy loading, but Site Kit is still telling me that my page load time is around 4.5 seconds, or “poor.”

I’m going to work on scaling down my images, and actually just heard back from the theme developer with the best sizes to use. But something else is definitely still at play, because even with the large images the site has never taken this long to load. @vmarko, could it possibly something related to something I need to change in W3 Total Cache settings?

I would imagine that after doing all that you should have seen a good lot of speed improvement, if you haven’t then it will be your shared hosting environment, there are other sites using all the resources and your site is suffering the consequences…..

Ideally you would want a hosting account to yourself or one which only shares with a few other people, not hundreds or thousands on one server… You would also be wise to make use of server-side caching instead of plugins like W3 etc. They are not bad but can’t beat server caching.

If you are planning on growing and want to make money from your site then good hosting is a priority, ensure they have NGINX, or run Litespeed, and also that you have things like OPCache and Memcached available, with up to date PHP versions (8+), MariaDB/MySQL etc. and a good control panel (cPanel) or similar so you can tweak things, also regular backups included (Daily or even hourly if you are working on your site regularly).

• This reply was modified 9 months, 4 weeks ago by Steven Stern (sterndata).
• This reply was modified 9 months, 4 weeks ago by Steven Stern (sterndata).

@shokku Moderator note: Please do not solicit work or ask for off-forum contact.

Sorry that was unintended…

Hello @bastecutfold

Thank you for your question.
While I agree with the point that the server resources are important and that the shared server has limited resources that can impact the performance of the website, the W3TC is more than page caching. It can utilize more than just Disk type of caching and use memory-based caching as well if available on the server.
Next, the Smush plugin notification does not share all the information. The W3TC has some features that may conflict with the Smush options like Lazyload however, those two plugins can be used simultaneously with the correct configuration.

I’ve checked your website and when it comes to optimization, there are a lot of aspects to take into consideration, images are good examples, however, it’s not just about the weight of the image as the position of the images on the page is also important because that determines what you need to do with the image (lazyload or preload)

I would recommend re-activating the W3 Total Cache and running the Setup guide. This will show the impact of Page Caching, Browser Caching, and others (Please note that memory-based caching is recommended for DB caching and Object Caching and you should not use Disk with those)

The most impact has the LCP image:
https://bastecutfold.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/DSC_0148-4-768×768.jpg
This image should be excluded from the lazyload and added to the Preload in Performance>User Experience>Preload Requests(Preload Requests need to be enabled in the General settings first)
If you have any other questions regarding the W3 Total Cache settings and optimization please open the new topic in the dedicated W3 Total Cache support forum.

I hope this helps!

Thanks!

You might also look in the inspector under network tab. Refresh the page once under the tab. You should get a list of items that are loading on your site and how long each item is taking to load. Also, you should visit google page speed insights https://pagespeed.web.dev/. It might point to some cause with possible solutions. Also you can look at google search central to help you improve your site. Search Central.