New to the community? Start here

Homepage loads so slowly since I started using your plugins - help!

Hi,

My homepage has been loading INCREDIBLY slowly - and other pages as well, but not quite as extreme.
This has been happening for the last week or so, and I really don't know what is causing this issue. The only thing I have changed is that I began using your plugins - but it must be a specific one because I've been using them for about 2 weeks, and the problem has only been occurring for a week or less. Please let me know what I can do to speed up page loading times on my site.

Thanks so much for your help.

  • Verenice
    • Flash Drive

    WordPress Plugin Profile Report
    ===========================================
    Report date: January 31, 2013
    Theme name: Aggregate
    Pages browsed: 14
    Avg. load time: 5.1511 sec
    Number of plugins: 26
    Plugin impact: 51.74% of load time
    Avg. plugin time: 2.6652 sec
    Avg. core time: 1.6165 sec
    Avg. theme time: 0.8191 sec
    Avg. mem usage: 71.70 MB
    Avg. ticks: 8,980
    Avg. db queries : 161.79
    Margin of error : 0.0502 sec

    Plugin list:
    ===========================================
    P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler) - 0.0274 sec - 1.03%
    WPMU Assist - 0.0012 sec - 0.04%
    Acurax Social Media Widget - 0.1049 sec - 3.94%
    Appointments+ - 0.1389 sec - 5.21%
    In Post Ads - 0.0168 sec - 0.63%
    Directory - 0.4905 sec - 18.40%
    Easy Digital Downloads - 0.2454 sec - 9.21%
    Easy Digital Downloads Search Widget - 0.0053 sec - 0.20%
    ET Shortcodes - 0.0218 sec - 0.82%
    Events + - 0.8016 sec - 30.08%
    Feature a Page Widget - 0.0504 sec - 1.89%
    Jetpack by WordPress.com - 0.0514 sec - 1.93%
    Login Image - 0.0094 sec - 0.35%
    MailChimp Sync - 0.0244 sec - 0.91%
    Members Directory - 0.0348 sec - 1.31%
    Pay With a Like - 0.0206 sec - 0.77%
    Proper. Widgets. - 0.0631 sec - 2.37%
    Recent Custom Posts Type Widget - 0.0181 sec - 0.68%
    Scheduled Content - 0.0706 sec - 2.65%
    Snapshot - 0.1814 sec - 6.80%
    Social Marketing - 0.0206 sec - 0.77%
    Subscribe by Email - 0.0103 sec - 0.39%
    Ultimate Branding - 0.0237 sec - 0.89%
    Form Manager - 0.0960 sec - 3.60%
    Infinite SEO - 0.1044 sec - 3.92%
    Wpmudev Updates - 0.0323 sec - 1.21%

  • Verenice
    • Flash Drive

    As far as hosting, I'm with Bluehost and they claim the space avail. to you is "unlimited" but I highly question their definition of unlimited.
    If you have suggestions on great hosting companies - or any other tips - I'm all ears.

  • Tom Eagles
    • Syntax Hero

    @Verenice

    Honestly i would recommend my host who just also happens to be one of the team here. His services rock all servers are really configured for wordpress no catches no hidden exceptions to guarantees. His site wpmu-hosting.org.

    I will tag him here as well as @aecnu is an expert on server performance etc.

    Cheers

    Tom

  • aecnu
    • WP Unicorn

    Greetings Verenice,

    Just chiming is as Tom had requested and I believe that you are victim of the Blue Host throttle is why things are so slow.

    Regarding the unlimited disk space, this has already been debunked and even Host Gator is a stone cold liar when it comes to this item because they count the files instead!

    So we have one that claims unlimited disk space but they count your files and when you get a certain amount of "inodes" they even stop backing up your site completely limiting to just the database and the other claims unlimited bandwidth but rather then the 100Mbps that the server is capable of, depending on the plan you may be being throttled at around 15Mbps - so instead of the flow being through a fire hose it is pushed through a straw.

    Many folks dealing with Blue Host complain about the speeds and on a side not they seem to have issues with PayPal IPN's as well though from the looks of it they may have resolved this since I have not seen any tickets from them of late concerning PayPal IPN's - but only time will tell on that one.

    Check out their reseller program, they even throttle their resellers starting at 15Mbps - pathetic at best.

    If one digs a bit here on WPMU DEV they find that many people now host with wpmu-hosting.org including several of the support staff as Tom does too.

    Thank you for being a WPMU DEV Community Member!

    Cheers, Joe

  • Verenice
    • Flash Drive

    Thank you all so much for the help.
    What speeds do you recommend for someone who has a minimum of 5 sites on a hosting plan (and growing)? Or rather - what speeds do you think I need per site (probably easier to say)?

    Are there any plugins (like the cache plugins) that help the loading speeds significantly? I dont think switching is financially do-able for me at the moment, but the second I'm able to - I'm outta there for sure!
    Until then, I'd love to hear your suggestions for other ways to fix the loading speeds.

    Thanks ya'll!

  • tbalves
    • Design Lord, Child of Thor

    Agree with above - BlueHost will definitely throttle your site depending on the number of files you have. This can be especially troublesome if they host your email accounts and if these accts leave a copy of your messages in the system.

    W3 Total Cache may speed things up, but you might want to identify plugins that are not absolutely necessary. Too many can be a drag on your load times.

  • Imperative Ideas
    • HummingBird

    One more thing -

    Your limits are account-wide. If you run this on your dashboard:
    http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-overview-lite/

    You will get an overview of a few critical server stats. If you were on Dreamhost, you would find that the basic hosting plan allocates you 64mb across all sites. As a standard WP install will burn around 40 while a commerce install pushes closer to 55, all it takes is someone hitting two sites at a time and your entire network slows to a crawl for the next 15 minutes.

    Bluehost is basically a Dreamhost clone with more aggressive CPU throttling.

  • Verenice
    • Flash Drive

    I dont know anything about this yet, but what about using Amazon AWS to speed things up? Which files would I host on their servers and which options are best? (S3+cloud or EC2 +cloud?) I'm a bit confused on what each does/is. But we will be streaming content, so I know that the cloud server will prob. have to be involved somehow.

  • Verenice
    • Flash Drive

    And I'm currently using w3 total cache and cloudflare and it seems to have sped things up quite a bit already... but I first disabled these plugins which also made a GIANT difference:
    - Events+
    - Snapshot

    When I activate either of those, the site is once again super sluggish. So you guys might want to look into that...

  • aecnu
    • WP Unicorn

    Greetings Verenice,

    Thank you for your input but what you are not realizing here is that every single plugin uses memory of your host and most hosts have a relatively small php memory allowance while these plugins and more literally scream on my servers without caching of any kind that an end user could possibly use - end user caching actually slows my performance servers down.

    When I activate either of those, the site is once again super sluggish. So you guys might want to look into that...

    As Imperative Ideas (Ian) mentioned above they give 64mb across all sites, php memory, some only give 32MB, we give 512MB's

    So what is happening is one is trying to fit all this in a sardine can and expecting it to work. RAM is the work space of the server/host and without enough space things go to a crawl or in many cases do not work at all.

    To just touch again on what Ian said about the php memory, we give 512MB even on a regular $3.95 hosting account.

    So though your site slows down on these plugins and on my servers nothing slows them down, I would as always honestly tell of reflect that it is not them - it is indeed your host which is in many cases the issue.

    People do not realize that the host is the very foundation of your site WordPress or not and think that all hosts are the same as they go along comparing numbers and prices, when in fact nothing can be further from the truth.

    In our case, not only was I already a network/server administrator prior to getting into WordPress just two short years ago, I spent a lot of time developing a server configuration that makes WordPress scream and stick to it on every server we produce configure to include the hardware and operating system and configuration thereof.

    So I must conclude that we have already looked into why this issue is happening on your current host - it is because of the configuration and throttling that your current host employs.

    Let me know if you want to do a free apples to apples test of hosting and I bet my hosting blows their doors off and fly's past them like they are not even moving - even without the caching and including having those two plugins activated.

    Cheers, Joe

Thank NAME, for their help.

1 Point
5 Points
15 Points
Other

Let NAME know exactly why they deserved these points.

Gift a custom amount of points.