Site loading VERY slowly

[jellis]

Hi,

I’ve been using the Alyeska Theme for about a year. It has always been a little slower than I’d like, but this past week all of our sites have been loading very slowly – sometimes 9 seconds or more to load a home page or WordPress admin panel.

I’m investigating all options because I’m not yet sure where the slowdown is happening.

Have there been changes or updates to the theme that could be causing the slow load time?

Here’s one of the sites: http://nashvillepubliclibrary.org/courtyardconcerts

Thanks,

Jenny

Topic

[Jason Bobich]

Hello,

If you’re not using a caching plugin, this can be night and day in the performance of your website. Setting up something like W3 Total Cache along with feeding assets from a CDN like Amazon S3 service (which integrates into W3 Total Cache) is a definite must these days for a snappy running site.

http://wordpress.org/plugins/w3-total-cache/

http://aws.amazon.com/s3/

Secondly, keep in mind that pulling in any data from a 3rd-party hosts can slow down your load times and give you varying results. So, for example, pulling a video from YouTube can either be instant or take an extra few seconds. You just never know because this depends on what is happening at their servers, at that moment.

Specifically on your site, I also see a Twitter stream. I’m not familiar with how the plugin you’re using works, but it appears it’s pulling from Twitter live through javascript on the first page load for every new visitor (although I’m not sure on that). That could be a definite factor, as well.

And finally, the seemingly most obvious thing to look at, when all else fails, can be your web hosting. Are you using some sort of inexpensive, shared plan? If so, you may want to consider upgrading there. Keep in mind that if you’re on a generic, cheap shared hosting account, you’re sharing server resources with tons of customers. How much traffic their sites are getting or how much server resources they’re using at any given time can effect your site and how long it takes to load, as well.

[Author]

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