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Initial Load of Webpage is slow... Any Suggestions

by jleavitt13
15 replies
I have just been hired to work on a website for a client and one of his big problems is his website loads extremely slow, at first. When you first type in his URL it takes a very long time to connect, and then eventually load the home pages. After that all of the internal pages seem to load at a decent speed. This is a WordPress site, hosted on Network Solutions.

Here is what I have tried so far:
  • WP Cache Plugin (and many others like it)
  • Reducing all image sizes and resolution
  • Deactivating all plugins and reactivating only the ones I need (only 3)

I have made many WP sites before and have never run into a problem like this where the home page seems to be running much slower than any other page. I am not sure if it is having a hard time connecting to the database or what. Any suggestions would be appreciated!

The website is www.lovefirstparenting.com
#initial #load #slow #suggestions #webpage
  • Profile picture of the author Zach Crawley
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    • Profile picture of the author jleavitt13
      yeah I called NetworkSolutions and they said everything checks out on their end. I am really at a loss here. Thinking about moving the site over to GoDaddy or something. But would hate to do that if it is just something wrong in WP
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  • Profile picture of the author webapex
    Yea, shared hosting can give unpredictable results, you can learn a little about the neighborhood with a reverse IP tool that reports all sites hosted on the same IP address, in some cases you might find a warez site with heavy traffic on the same server, you might get the host to mitigate the situation if there's an obvious offender.

    There are freebie server speed test utilities out there, presumably you have to upload a test file for it to access.

    BTW one WP cash that claims to be the fastest offloads to Amazon S3, it's fastest using the Amazon cloud (I don't recall the name right now, it's a littler more tricky than other cache plugins)
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    “An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field” Niels Bohr

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  • Profile picture of the author Nail Yener
    There are a number of free services that gives you a detailed analysis on your website loading speed. You can use them to figure out which parts (markup, css, images, scripts, etc.) you need to improve.

    Here are some of them:

    http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/
    http://www.webpagetest.org/
    http://code.google.com/p/page-speed/
    http://tools.pingdom.com/
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  • Profile picture of the author VegasGreg
    1st off, nice looking site! It looks great.

    2nd, I didn't see anything ON the site that would cause such a drastic delay in loading. And it was a LOOOOOOONG load time. Way longer than I anticipated and I have a decent internet connection.

    I am guessing it is the host. I have never dealt with that particular host though, so can't say for sure.

    I have experience exyremely slow load times with Godaddy hosting too (only with WP sites), but even they are faster that what I just saw - lol.

    If you do switch hosts though, try hostgator instead of Godaddy. It will save you hours of time when working on the site, and the customer will appreciate the quicker load time as well.

    Hosts will often times say everything checks out ok for their standards, but for normal use, there is still an issue. I bet their hosts doesnt have a local host for their mysql databases, which will cause the slow load times with WP.

    Hope that helps.
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    Greg Schueler - Wordpress Fanatic... Living The Offline Marketing Dream...

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  • Profile picture of the author redfieryheart
    The only thing I can see right now for the cause of your problem is the hosting provider. Although they told you that it is all okay at their end, it's the hosting that cause the delay.
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    • Profile picture of the author SamirSM
      Look carefully in the status bar of your browser, and if you see that the connection has been established but the files of the webpage are not getting transferred it is a problem with the hosting server(s).

      However, if the connection itself is taking too long to get established, the problem is with domain name resolution. You need to change the domain name registrar.
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      Technology and Blogging Tips
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  • Profile picture of the author jamjar919
    Try these analytics - Page Speed Online
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    Feel free to ask me any IM related questions or add me on skype :D
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  • Profile picture of the author Rich Struck
    It loaded slow for me too. I wouldn't use Network Solutions for anything and certainly not hosting. You mentioned GoDaddy hosting, that is likely worse than what you have now. I use DreamHost with great success and a lot of people here use Host Gator (which I tried and didn't care for but that is just me).
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  • Profile picture of the author UMS
    Have you tried "W3 Total Cache"
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    • Profile picture of the author Lord of the North
      Hello

      Looks like it's a hosting issue to me !
      I hope you can fix it ASAP.
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  • Profile picture of the author TEMA
    Try using cloudflare, they have a free option which caches the static parts of a website at different server around the world, works a bit like a content delivery network. Best thing I ever did for my websites, they load about 7 times faster - measured it myself.
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  • Profile picture of the author greggreg
    Banned
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    • Profile picture of the author wklee
      Banned
      If you are using wordpress, install WP super cache and delete post revisions. What delete post revisions plugin do is that it delete those old revisions that you do not need and clean up your database.
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      • Profile picture of the author Ralf Skirr
        Instead of moving the site to a new host right away, which is quite a big deal in case the hosting is NOT the reason, you could try this:

        1. Create a clone of the site. You can do this manually or using one of the tools available for that job.
        2. Install that clone on any of your own hosting packages (assuming you have an unused domain, which most IMers have).
        3. See how fast the clone loads.
        It takes only a few minutes to do this, and you will immediately see if the blog performs better on different hosting.

        The current server looks packed though. IP search:
        ip:205.178.145.82 - Bing

        Ralf
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  • Profile picture of the author TroyNotes
    I strongly suspect that the shared hosting has you on some backburner until you request your needed then they reheat you. So one possible strategy if you're commited to this is some chron job to ping the server and keep it alive. e.g. pingdom.com but this isn't free.

    Aside from the clone.

    Some plugin may be going haywire, So Disable ALL plugins to see if that helps. Especially cache, as configured incorrectly cache can make performance WORSE, e.g. rebuilding the cache could be what's causing the site load stall the first time. After things work, then start renabling half at a time to see if that helps or hinders.

    Also move all static assets off the site onto a CDN like S3 or cloudfront. This will basically offload half the requests allowing the server to focus on serving the PHP side rather than every image, sound, css, etc.
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  • Profile picture of the author jleavitt13
    Thank you all for the amazing advice. It is greatly appreciated. Still trying to figure out the exact issue... But thanks for sharing the knowledge
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