WordPress Really Slow or Timing Out

Do you use any type of caching plugin such as super cache? This can help.

Some of the images would definitely benefit from being compressed, as you can see here that a number of your larger 200kb+ images are taking some time to load.
Caesium image compressor

As you have a lot of calls to load the site, you could consider signing up for a CDN such as CloudFare or Incapsula, which both have free plans to get things started and trial improvements.

Do you have many plugins installed? You can test the impact of those plugins on page load using the P3Profiler, and change any which are consuming too many resources.

Keep testing your site load performance on:
https://www.webpagetest.org
https://tools.pingdom.com/
https://gtmetrix.com/

Finally, if you are still struggling, and are on shared hosting, you might want to mention this to your host and see if you can have your site moved to another server (or consider a different host).

God luck!

213 resources to load!!!! no wonder it is slow.beside above tips by @Barnez you should work on reducing requests made.

Thanks so much for your advice! I’ll look into CloudFare and Incapsula.

I have about 15 plugins. I deleted the ones I wasn’t using a week ago. I went to view my plugins page just now and I got a 408 request time-out error.
“Server timeout waiting for the HTTP request from the client.
Apache Server at box981.bluehost.com Port 80″

I’ve been adjusting things and using pingdom to check my speed over the past week but my changes don’t seem to be making too much of a difference. I will check with bluehost since I’m on a shared server.

Okay so I don’t know a whole bunch about the backend of things. What does 213 resources to load mean? Do I need to hire a coder to fix it for me?

please spend some time with these results:-
https://www.webpagetest.org/result/150405_0D_NPC/

few issue i find out are :-
-Loading from this URL ,https://69.195.124.181/~burlapb3/ most probably a Bluehost internal URL, you should fix this and change all image pointing here to your website
-loading images from i2.wp.com example image https://i2.wp.com/www.burlapandbabies.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Meet-Your-Hosts.jpg?resize=730%2C555

you can hire someone too if it is too technical for you, but recommendation of Barnes are easy to follow and your website should be lot faster.

Not sure about that 408 time-out error as I’ve never seen one before. Is it resolved or a constant issue?

Regarding the 213 resources laliz points outm have a look here (https://www.webpagetest.org/result/150405_0K_HZT/1/details/), each numbered line in the vertical waterfall is an http request for a file from your server (host). These include javascript, html, css, images etc. Basically everything you need to render a complete website page on your site. The more http requests you have, the more time it can take to complete the page load (but that depends on your host, site setup, caching system, etc.).

It can help to reduce the number of calls if possible, but of course you don’t want to negatively impact on the appearance of your site :). That’s why the CDN could be helpful, as it would serve some of these resources from other locations, rather than trying to call them all from your hosting company’s server – hope this is not too jargony.

One thing that could help is remove the shareaholic social media buttons from the homepage blog roll, as each of those toolbars under the blog snippits has 6 or 7 http calls for the social media icons, and there are 5 blog excerpts on the homepage. Is there a setting in that plugin to only show the social media bar below the full posts? Maybe worth checking the settings and/or on the plugin forum.

Site looks great btw, so you’re doing a fine job there, just the fine tuning of performance left to tweak.

If I refresh, the 408 error will usually go away but often happens multiple times within a short span (30ish minutes).

Great idea on shareaholics. I changed it to just display on the individual posts and that changed my requests to 176. I’ll keep working through all this stuff. Thanks!

Hi @burlapandbabies let us know if we can help! — [email protected]

That’s great. The site definitely seems to be loading faster without the share icons below the blog snippits on the homepage.

Regarding the 408 error, i would contact your host about that, as it sounds like an issue on the server (host) side rather than anything WordPress related.

I am using linux ubuntu 14.10 and I am really in trouble with this 408 error. Its a self-hosted WordPress website which I have no trouble logging in but my problem is whenever I try to make a new post to save to draft or publish I get the 408 error. I have no problem accessing other websites. I used android devices to access the website, I am also getting the same error whenever I try to make a post. But, when I tried to use a different laptop using the same service provider, I was able to do make posts without a problem. How can I fix this? If the other laptop was able to access all sections of the website, that means it is not a trace route issue? Or is it because my upload speed is .99 mbps? Pls HELP!

I am using linux ubuntu 14.10 and I am really in trouble with this 408 error. Its a self-hosted WordPress website ( https://maggiesfreedomfarms.com/ ) which I have no trouble logging in but my problem is whenever I try to make a new post to save to draft or publish I get the 408 error. I have no problem accessing other websites. I used android devices to access the website, I am also getting the same error whenever I try to make a post. But, when I tried to use a different laptop using the same service provider, I was able to do make posts without a problem. How can I fix this? If the other laptop was able to access all sections of the website, that means it is not a trace route issue? Or is it because my upload speed is .99 mbps? Pls HELP!