Nailing Down Slow Performance in WordPress
5.29.2006 | WordPress, WordPress Plug-ins
I have been very frustrated over the last few weeks with the performance of a few of my WordPress web sites. At first I was convinced that it was my web host. I spent a couple of days yelling at them and making them look into the performance of their web and DB severs, switches, router, whatever. They were nice and put up with me and tweaked a couple of things that made their throughput better, but my sites did not get better.
In my research I found that the Short Stats plug-in that I use might be causing the issue so I disabled it but no joy.
Finally, I needed to start from scratch to get to the bottom of what was going on.
These are the steps that I followed to nail down my performance issues -
- Went back to the original theme which I had not done any modifications to.
- Disabled every plug-in.
- With the admin section open in Firefox, I opened the front end of the site in IE.
- I cleared the cache of IE, closed it, then reopened it.
- I browsed the site – It rocked! Nice and fast.
- I enabled my theme without any plug-ins enabled
- One by one I added my plug-ins back in. Each time I activate a plug-in I browsed to a post that I had not been to before so I was not pulling from the cache.
- I add the plug-ins in one-by-one until one showed a considerable performance hit.
- I then identified the trouble plug-in
Once you find out which plug-in is giving you trouble you can research to find if anyone has fixed it or just leave it disabled if it is not important.
For me it was the LightBox plug-in. I am not quite sure why it was slowing things down for me but I think it has something to do with the JavaScript it loads in the header. I have not decided yet whether I am going to re-activate it yet. I think I am going to monitor my site for a few days first to make sure that I do not have any further issues.
P.S. I forgot, I also removed my hand coded (non-plugin) Google Analytics too. This was also JavaScript.
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5.29.2006
Dan,
I think it is ShortStat as well. I’ve notice my site running really slow lately. Today I disabled Shortstat and it seems ot be running much quicker. We’ll see if that is it.
Mike
5.29.2006
There is actually something you can do to fix ShortStats. It seems that it has to go to seperate server to get the country info and that can take some time.
There is a post about it here.
6.05.2006
I didn’t have any problems prior to using the Lightbox plug-in. I appreciate your input! As cool as it looks, it’s not that big a deal to display my images in this fashion. I will probably deactivate it on my site.
8.17.2006
Dan,
Thanks for the heads up on the Lightbox plugin. I have also disabled the plugin and my site loads significantly quicker.
In my opinion the Lightbox effect is cool initially but then became a pain – have gone back to a traditional gallery.
Regards
Gary O
11.08.2006
Dan, thanks for taking the time to work these steps out. In the last few days I installed several gallery plugins (lazy gallery, ANIga and one other that I can’t remember now.) My blog was so slow that I couldn’t take it. I removed plugins, removed google analytics and reverted to the default template. While the blog loaded more quickly, it still takes about 8 seconds to load.
http://www.lauriemcginley.com/blog/
I reverted to the design tweaks but left all plugins off, deleted them from the server and removed extra themes from the site.
Any ideas?
12.14.2006
I had the exact same problem with the wp-lightbox2 plugin, although mine only started slowing down over the last few days.
I too, had a crack at my hosting providers, to no avail.
My problem now is that I really liked the way the lightbox plugin worked before it all slowed down to a drastic halt, and I have a number of clients using the same plugin.
Anyone got any ideas for a workaround?
12.14.2006
@Mark -
You might want to see if you have the latest and greatest version of the Lightbox plugin.
If I recall correctly the latest release had a lighter JavaScript code which should make it faster.
IMO no matter what you are probably going to see a performance hit no matter what.
8.04.2007
[...] host, a plugin, or some content that it just to stinking big. I found an article by Idano called Nailing Down Slow Performance in Wordpress. The approach outlined entailed reverting to the default theme, disabling all plugins, and then one [...]
4.17.2008
[...] http://www.idano.net/nailing-down-slow-performance-in-wordpress-74.htm [...]
6.23.2008
Amazing. My RSS feeds have been timing out and my WP blogs load slow as can be. I thought it was an RSS feed problem, and then a server problem, because the feed was always timing out.
I just disabled the ShortStat plug in, and now my RSS feeds do not time out.
…. not sure why, but it’s working now.
Mark
Mark’s – All About Real Estate Blog
6.23.2008
Mark,
I actually dumped shortstats altogether for the WordPress.com stats. It is free and has more info. The other thing that I like is that if you have multiple blogs you can register them all under the same WordPress.com account and can toggle easily between each site’s stats.
You should check it out – WordPress.com Stats
8.03.2009
[...] El blog ya estaba demasiado lento al punto de ser insoportable. Me puse a buscar y encontré este listado de tips para resolver problemas de velocidad que finalmente resolvió el problema. Como el listado está en [...]
8.19.2009
[...] a plugin, or some content that it just to stinking big. I found an article by Idano called Nailing Down Slow Performance in Wordpress. The approach outlined entailed reverting to the default theme, disabling all plugins, and then one [...]