Developer (local) environment very slow

These changes might be helpful under the context in which the initial question was phrased: ” Using WordPress without an Internet Connection”, but will be extremely unhelpful in helping you develop your website, among others it will make this support website disappear. Also remove google fonts from your theme.

Instead I suggest that you install a browser inspector such as firebug if you are using firefox (other browsers have equivalent plugins), firebug has a net connection tab, shows a list of webpage components and the sites they are requested from along with download times. This should give you some clues as to what is dragging down your website.

On the other hand it could be that some plugin is doing alot of work, experimentally disable them one by one.

Also look at your web server’s error logs, it may be that some issue is bogging down your server.

It looks like wp-admin is using most of the time to load…. how can i track down this?

See here: https://s32.postimg.org/bqp0eimd1/Untitled.png

Well done for getting this info.
Can you expand the “name” column to get the compete file name and site info.
Also I am much more interested in what your website does as against the admin, so rather than profiling the dashboard could you target a typical webpage.

A typical page…. 2.8s just to retrieve the page? And more than 5s in the dashboard?

I am not so fussed about the dashboard, lots of heavy lifting there.

On the typical page, what does the firebug NET panel show to be the time consuming parts ?

A lot of rubbish being accessed over the internet! OMG! Whay is that?

See here: https://s32.postimg.org/z9skmxh9h/Untitled.png

Try and figure out which aspect / plugin of your website is invoking each fetch, the domain name is a clue, google them to find out what they do. For instance the “akamaihd.net” ones are about CDN (content delivery network) servers.

Once you know what is causing each fetch, then you can decide if you really need it and can disable the plugin or service involved.

For instance you may decide that you can do without google fonts and use websafe fonts instead.

You may need to search your website files to find which plugins or files refer to specific domains. A recursive file search program will do this.

Thumbs up Ross, you hit the spot! I will dig into those calls inspecting the originating plugin ??

Why would you stay away from google fonts?

Why would you stay away from google fonts?

BECAUSE they have to be downloaded to view the page.
BECAUSE they tell google which websites you are visiting!

You can download any google font and embed it into your site yourself, you know.

Thank you esmi, I didn’t know that. Do the google font plugins manage this ?
Would sure deal with the tracking issue, of course then the bandwidth hits your server.
Certainly is the solution for stand alone (off internet) servers.

Do the google font plugins manage this ?

I couldn’t honestly say as I’ve never used one of those plugins but, best guess, no. They’ll probably use a Google API to pull the fonts directly from google.com.

I just pick which fonts I want, download them, then use something like https://www.fontsquirrel.com/tools/webfont-generator to create the CSS for me (if I’m feeling especially lazy).

Good to know!