Front-end AND Back-end running EXTREMELY SLOW on DreamHost server

  • Website address: kcdpr.com

    I’ve recently noticed a dramatic slow-down of our company website. Actually, the back-end has always been slow and whenever one page is loaded after another too quickly, I get a “page-not-found” or “500 Internal server error”.

    Sinced looking into this issue, I have downloaded W3 total cache and have turned on all the minify setting and page cache settings. Though looking at the Pingdom Speed test speeds it doesn’t seem to help much at all. It is extremely inconsistent.

    Here is the link to the Pingdom results
    https://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/jg2EL/https://kcdpr.com

    The page itself, once it starts loading is very fast, but what takes a long time seems to be the waiting time right before the page starts to load.

    Host– We are hosted on Dreamhost which I thought was a pretty good web-host and ranks pretty high for server speeds. So my first question is, if I were to change hosts, what specification should I be focus on to ensure maximum page-load speeds?

    Plugins I’ve attempted at the method of deactivating all plugins and turning them on one by one. However it was extremely difficult to pin down any changes as the website load speed is extremely inconsistent even when I run the Pingdom tests on one page without changing anything.

    How do I find out the root of the issue causing the slow down? Once I figured out an issue I can then take steps to make changes including possibly moving my hosting to a different company.

    Thanks in advance for any help!

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Moderator James Huff

    (@macmanx)

    Internal server errors (error 500) are often caused by plugin or theme function conflicts, so if you have access to your admin panel, try deactivating all plugins. If you don’t have access to your admin panel, try manually resetting your plugins (no Dashboard access required). If that resolves the issue, reactivate each one individually until you find the cause.

    If that does not resolve the issue, try switching to the Twenty Fourteen theme to rule-out a theme-specific issue. If you don’t have access to your admin panel, access your server via FTP or SFTP, navigate to /wp-content/themes/ and rename the directory of your currently active theme. This will force the default theme to activate and hopefully rule-out a theme-specific issue.

    If that does not resolve the issue, it’s possible that a .htaccess rule could be the source of the problem. To check for this, access your server via FTP or SFTP and rename the .htaccess file. If you can’t find a .htaccess file, make sure that you have set your FTP or SFTP client to view invisible files.

    If you weren’t able to resolve the issue by either resetting your plugins and theme or renaming your .htaccess file, we may be able to help, but we’ll need a more detailed error message. Internal server errors are usually described in more detail in the server error log. If you have access to your server error log, generate the error again, note the date and time, then immediately check your server error log for any errors that occurred during that time period. If you don’t have access to your server error log, ask your hosting provider to look for you.

    Thread Starter rcj01001

    (@rcj01001)

    Great, as the site gets quite a bit of traffic, I will wait until late in the night to try the plug-in solution.

    Moderator James Huff

    (@macmanx)

    Please let us know how it goes! ??

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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