Website running really slow!

Took about 3-4 seconds for the page to fully load for me.

What about sub pages? They seem to still load slowly.

You may ask your hosting provider whether you exceeded your bandwidth or not?

@richardwpg – they would hardly throttle the speed of delivery of files would they? I suppose you would have to look at the T&Cs of the hosting, what they do in the event of exceeding bandwidth. I thought they would merely charge you the excess usage, they normally charge for every GB over or so.

@ johnnyflash – The sub pages do seem to load slowly. I tested a page I previously had not visited on your site and thus had no cache version of. It took about 26secs to load completely. The reason being the sheer number of additional components in the background.

https://www.openresources.org/categories/message-series/finance – This was the post I tested, in the background there were 70 files to fetch before the page was fully loaded. That totaled 83kb of data, which is fine, that’s quite small, as there was even a few images included in that, which are very small. Your browser only sends a set number of HTTP requests at once, which increases the load time as all the files are queued.

Looking at the above file, there are a number of share buttons for each post, and a number of posts. Another example here took 2.7mins to load. Of which there was 114 HTTP requests, but only 98kb of Data. It is the volume of requests being made which is slowly down the page load.

Perhaps reducing the share options on the category landing pages, and offering all of the share options on the post page would keep the volume of requests down?

Hope this helps explain the potential issue. Though, I’d like to hear other people’s opinions. Obviously I don’t know everything! I usually try to reduce the number of requests where possible by using sprite images. I’d try to consolidate my CSS files, and try to limit the number of unnecessary files (CSS, Javascript) loading in the background.

I found this link a bit ago. It tries to help you minimise http requests. You should probably ignore the make page HTML though…

That is a great response (above my own), but I think you should first tackle this from the perspective of “Define the problem; then figure out how to fix it”.

I checked the main page, then the two pages to which harmck linked, and then two more subpages (in the Ministries sections). Sometimes it is hard to tell this, but try checking each page after clearing your browser cache (mentioned above, a good suggestion to ensure this is how new visitors are seeing the page) and using a blank tab. Reason being, it appears that…once the host responded to my requests, the load time was less than 2 seconds. All I seem to notice is that it takes awhile before loading/rendering even begins, which might be that to which you are referring.

This wiki article (apparently pertaining to a particular hosting service) should apply to your situation and be highly relevant: https://neowiki.neoseeker.com/wiki/Troubleshooting_Slow_Pages_on_Neoseeker

Where it says “[ server id: venture ··· elapsed: 0.4924869537 ]”, this is definitely a bit that is generated by some custom troubleshooting code they use on their pages.

In reference to creating that output, a quick Google search turned up this link to what appears to be the most important snippet of code needed to generate this sort of data. I suggest putting a variation of that code at the bottom of some pages you feel are loading slowest to more easily compare the load duration (described in 1. of the first link as “if you count that it takes 10 seconds for a page to load and the elapsed time of the page is 10.35seconds it means…”) versus the connection reaction time (described in 2.). When added together, these two durations are the actual time it takes from click to full display. But without one or the other being defined through server output…you get the idea!

From what I am seeing, it appears that 2. is more likely to be occurring (and hence the fault would lie with your internet connection, not your host), but I cannot definitively answer either way without actually getting a residual message from the page reflecting this.

Best of luck to you in defining the actual problem, and hopefully its only your personal connection at fault.

@richardwpg – I am far from my bandwidth and I am not being throttled so I know that is not the issue.

@harmck – Thanks for your detective work. The thing that makes it odd, is that I can disable all the plugins (including the sharing ones) and it still loads very slowly. Will look into the high http requests possibility.

@joshua – Will check it out. Thanks.

@markmassengale – I think you may be on to it… it seems to be that the initial response is slow and then the page content fairly quickly. This seems to be confirmed by a full page test from https://tools.pingdom.com – I will read the article you linked and give that a try.

Potentially server memory. As you have a magazine-type wordpress blog with a lot of content, php memory and hardware memory can make a difference.