Load speed of WP lately.

The Recent Comments and Super Archives plugins have been the source of slowdowns and hosting service evictions before. How does your blog perform will all plugins deactivated?

If that doesn’t show any improvement, I recommend that you start troubleshooting your theme by fixing your XHTML validation errors.

https://validator.w3.org/check?verbose=1&uri=https://www.kensavage.com/

Also, your blog is currently displaying 211.7k of images, giving it a total size of 315.5k, which means that it will load in over a minute on a 56k connection.

https://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/

Nice Web Page Analyzer tool

I doubt it’s any of those problems. The page takes 3 seconds just to start to load. I don;t even see the title for 4 seconds.
Must be something in the code or backend. I dont think its the HTML.

Anyone got ideas?

Ken-
Firefox spends 4-5 seconds on the “waiting for https://www.kensavage.com” status bar message, which makes me think your host’s server needs an Apache restart or perhaps is just overloaded.

Methinks the page would start to load faster if it was a problem internal to your blog; since you get nothing for so long, I bet it’s the server.

Can you check any other sites hosted on this server to see if they have the same problem?

Yes, Safari spends about 4 seconds simply waiting for https://www.kensavage.com to respond. I agree with Justin. I think that something is wrong with your server. Either Apache is in need of a refresh, or your server is simply overloaded.

Well that really can’t be the case because this page: https://www.kensavage.com/privatecam.html loads very fast and is simple as can be.

It’s somewhere within WP or maybe the database.

First email your host and get them to check things.
Then you must start eliminating plugins one by one to establish which is the problem.
A base WP install should be very very fast – and each plugin you add could slow that.
Get this:
/*
Plugin Name: Jerome's Query Diagnostics
Plugin URI: https://vapourtrails.ca/wp-plugins
Version: 1.0
Description: Simple plugin to output query diagnostics in a HTML comment block in the page footer.
Author: Jerome Lavigne
Author URI: https://vapourtrails.ca
*/
and use that along with deactivating plugins to find out what is what.
My money is on a plugin.

I’ve disabled 1/2 of the plugins I was using and it sped up the site a bit. Still laggy on load.

Ken,

I realise this thread is quite old, but thought i’d put my two cents in.

This may or may not help. It is (still haven’t fully diagnosed it) the major source of my speed problems. https://www.devdawn.com.

In your theme’s header.php file (i used K2), you should see a call to wp_head().

This is the function that I’ve removed from is_home(), and kept for all the others. If you watch how fast the home page loads as compared to the sub-pages, it’s quite a margin.

From my recollection (I’m about to undertake more serious diagnosis right now) it’s got something to do with how many times wp_head() (or functions underneath) access the database.

Will report back if i get it fixed.

I had a bad problem with load speed with a work website I run, and boy what a huge difference it made when I “unplugged” Recent Comments!

Stu@devdawn, I’d be very interested to hear more about the optimisation investigation you’re undertaking – it would be great if you could report back here. ??