Another problem with extremely slow loading and 500 errors on Dreamhost

500 MB is actually quite a lot. You should be able to run most things on it.

Looking at your site (those are some adorable photos!), the first thing that jumps out at me is that you are using photos, which are large, and can slow your site down. But I don’t think they’re your issue here.

The problem I think you’re having is in part from your plugins. This is probably totally obvious to you, but the more times your website calls out to external servers, the slower it gets. Logical, right?
When I looked at the source code of your main site, I saw multiple instances of jquery, coming from external sources.

<script type="text/javascript" src="https://code.jquery.com/jquery-latest.min.js"></script>

and

<script type="text/javascript" src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jqueryui/1/jquery-ui.min.js"></script> (which is being called by your sunshine plugin).

The worst part is that jquery comes with WordPress! So no plugin or theme should be calling out to an external site. I would contact the makers of ‘sunshine-pro’ and tell them to use wp_enequeue_script() instead of calling an external jquery, as it will help a LOT of people.

If I had to pick a plugin on your site that would be suspect, it would be flexsitez. I went to your server and looked a little at that code, and right away they’re doing a number of things ‘wrong’ (such as calling wp-config.php from the plugin file directly). The weirdest thing is that I’m actually pretty sure that flexsitez is a theme, not a plugin, so it’s in the wrong place and possible causing some of your issues.

I would also recommend you remove some of your plugins since you’ve got some duplicated effort going on there.

Jetpack has a sharing module, which would replace the need for simple-twitter-link and possibly facebook, depending on how you’re using it. It also has WP.com Statts, which obviates the need for official-statcounter-plugin-for-wordpress.

While I know that’s a lot to start banging on, one cheap and easy way to speed up your site would be to start using caching. You’re already using pagespeed (yay!), so WP-Super-Cache would be a pretty simple way to make your site faster for users. I also wrrote a little explanation on how you can customize pagespeed on your site by editing your .htaccess file: https://elftest.net/kick-pagespeed-up-a-notch/

I hope that helps you out some!

Thank you for that info. I really appreciate the time you too.

Spoke to the Sunshine plugin developer and he said:
“Sunshine already does call the internal version of jQuery that comes with WordPress. I do use wp_enqueue_script exactly as he outlines already. When I first was coding and doing testing of the Default Sunshine Theme, I was using a local version of jQuery. While that file is in the plugin, it is never called nor used. So there is nothing to actually to change with Sunshine except remove that file that is not in use.”

Portfoliositez is a theme, but it has a plugin, too. Not sure if that’s a big deal or not.

Thanks for the other info, too – I’ll be making some changes.

P.S. I had removed simple-twitter-link and it turns out the theme needs it for the blog posts so it has to stay in there regardless.

“Sunshine already does call the internal version of jQuery that comes with WordPress. I do use wp_enqueue_script exactly as he outlines already. When I first was coding and doing testing of the Default Sunshine Theme, I was using a local version of jQuery. While that file is in the plugin, it is never called nor used. So there is nothing to actually to change with Sunshine except remove that file that is not in use.”

I didn’t say the sunshine theme, I said the plugin, and this is an important distinction.

I’m looking at the code in sunshine-functions.php and I see function sunshine_custom_login_logo()

In that I see this:

if ($_GET['role'] == 'sunshine-customer') {
                echo '<script src="//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.9.0/jquery.min.js"></script>
                <script>
                jQuery(document).ready(function(){
                        jQuery("#backtoblog a, h1 a").attr("href", "'.sunshine_url('home').'");
                });
                </script>';
        }

That right there is calling external jquery and it’s not even enqueued.