New WP site on Bluehost running slower than expected

  • I moved from Godaddy to bluehost expecting a big bump in speed. I did get an ever so slight bump in speed but not what I expected based on some of the reading here. My site is new and not too heavy but yet seems to load slowly for me. I even rebuilt it from scratch and did not export from GoDaddy. Can someone in the USA take a look and tell me if you experience the same slowness? Any suggestions on caching plugins that work well with bluehost?

    Thanks,
    https://www.gentryfoto.com

Viewing 13 replies - 1 through 13 (of 13 total)
  • Moderator Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

    (@ipstenu)

    ?????? Advisor and Activist

    It’s not terribly slow for me.

    Try WP Super Cache.

    Most pages are fine but the slideshows load slower than I’d like (4-5 seconds). If I was a visitor, I may have given up.

    Thread Starter osu9400

    (@osu9400)

    Thanks for the feedback. Gabe, what is your general location?

    It’s not too bad, my favorite photography website https://www.deviantart.com/ where I post images is slower, but that doesn’t drive away the huge no. of visitors, content can be great. Of course, internet connection speed is also a factor.

    I just found a Bluehost optimization tutorial, and my Google speed score is now past 90%, from the usual 89%, on Bluehost. Watch the video and do as instructed.

    https://www.wordpresshowtotips.com/bluehost/speed-up-wordpress-on-bluehost-with-php5-fast-cgi-and-zlib-compression/

    And don’t forget to activate “Compress the specified MIME types” at “Optimize Website” under “Software Services” in your Bluehost cpanel.

    In combination with the best cache plugin I’ve tried for shared hosting (so long as one doesn’t go overboard with too many “unnecessary” plugins), W3 Total Cache, in tandem with Better WordPress Minify, WP Widget Cache and inspite of using a heavy loading Suffusion theme, all is well for now.

    https://www.astrasuite.com/astrablog/

    Of course, revisits are faster than first visit due to the caching.

    You can use the following to check your site speed from multiple locations. It’s not perfect, but gives a good example: https://internetsupervision.com/scripts/urlcheck/check.aspx?lan=en-US&checkurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.gentryfoto.com

    The site seems to be working fairly well, but I’d agree with Ipstenu that a caching plugin would be good.

    @osu, I’m in the Philly area.

    BTW, although you can try all these plugins and whatnot, I typically find that reducing image sizes will resolve many speed issues.

    Moderator Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

    (@ipstenu)

    ?????? Advisor and Activist

    I’m in Illinois.

    The slideshow speed may be due to the code running it. What are you using?

    Thread Starter osu9400

    (@osu9400)

    Thanks for the replies. I have reduced the size of images as much as I feel comfortable doing. I will def check out the bluehost tutorial.

    p.s. don’t enable zlib compression in Bluehost if using w3 Total cache … just enable PHP5 fast CGI

    Just checked and the slide show speed is about 3 seconds (improved from 4-5 from last week).

    Thread Starter osu9400

    (@osu9400)

    Gabe/astrasuite/et al, thanks for checking back. It’s interesting that the speed is better because I made no changes until this past hour. I’m not surprised your results varied because I have seen the same thing in the week this site has been live. The changes I just made include:
    – Enable PHP5 Fast CGI
    – Enabled zlib compression to level 9
    – Compress the specified MIME types for text/html text/plain text/xml
    – I have added NO caching plugins.

    Right now, I can’t tell much difference, but I am going to keep these settings for now and see what happens. I’m still to other suggestions and speed reports.

    Thread Starter osu9400

    (@osu9400)

    FYI: Bluehost just upgraded the infrasturcture that runs my account. They upgraded to the latest version of CentOS Linux and made some storage improvements. I would say that my performance is now acceptable in the photo galleries. If you notice otherwise, please let me know.

    The speed of your site seems fine to me though the photos did take a while to load. If you have moved from one shared hosting account with GoDaddy to another shared hosting then the speed difference isn’t usually much.

    I’ve only ever seen good improvements in speed when moving from shared hosting to VPS or Dedicated server.

Viewing 13 replies - 1 through 13 (of 13 total)
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