Wordfence causing slowdown of our website?

  • We’ve recently moved our website to a more secure SSL server and noticed a severe slowdown in the speed of the website. Through a process of trial and error, we have determined that the cause of this slowdown is the Wordfence plugin. When the Wordfence plugin is disabled the website definitely speeds up and there wasn’t a problem previously on the old web server.

    So, are there any known issues with the latest release of Wordfence (7.1.6 currently installed), does it have a measurable impact on website speed and/or are there any acknowledged incompatibilities with specific servers/hosts?

    Unless we find a solution to this problem we are confronted with the options of: disabling Wordfence (not really possible if we want to protect our website from hackers), changing our web host (again not an option we’re currently looking at) or finding a different plugin that does a comparable job to Wordfence.

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

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  • I did extensive testing of Wordfence regarding speed issues on my VPS using SSL, didn’t see anything significant a few versions ago, and have not seen any clues that things have changed. Try disabling Wordfence scan and check size of all the Wordfence database tables, if any are bloated, research and truncate (empty) if possible. Beyond that, there is no plugin in the universe that works for everyone, perhaps Wordfence isn’t for you… Speaking from experience, I’ve tried 500+ WordPress plugins over the years, many were junk, only a couple dozen have ever worked out. I only run ten or so at a time, due to the nightmarish nature of the WordPress plugin ecosystem (e.g., security issues, going orphan, resource hogging, etc.) I do like Wordfence and it’s not junk, but in my opinion it’s over-rated in terms of it being perceived as an end-all security solution. If you harden your WordPress site using suggestions you can google, use a quality hosting company, utilize .htaccess file, and do solid backups, a “security” plugin is just a supplement. MTN

    Thread Starter [email protected]

    (@winglee)

    Update: Our web-hosting provider has moved our website to a different server, and this now seems to have ‘cured’ the problem. However, they did note “the plugin is requiring more than our shared hosting limits of 60 secs execution time”, so we can only assume the Wordfence plugin does have some limitations when used on certain server configurations.

    Hi @winglee

    I believe following this guide in adjusting the maximum execution time should help in this case.

    Thanks.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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