What is the cause of these site speed issues?

Please provide a link to your site! Thanks.

and I thought I’d been so thorough!

https://www.wardandsmith.co.uk

Thanks for the prompt!

It’s 2.18 seconds for Time To First Byte — that indicates that your server is either overloaded or needs tuning. If you’re on shared hosting, be sure to do a bit of complaining. Also, try using some good caching plugins. My current recommendation is a combination of autoptimize and wp super cache.

First of all, the site looks awesome! Very professional design ??

It appears like you are indeed on shared hosting (based on some domain tools available on the web). As a matter of fact, you are sharing the same server with 168 other domains. As such, you are at the mercy of the traffic load of other sites.

In this case, you are you can optimize your heart out but doing so will only speed it up by a few seconds and thus won’t speed it up enough to counter the visitor patience issue. I’d strongly suggest moving to VPS, Dedicated, or Managed WordPress hosting.

Thank you Robert – so kind of you to say! ??

I will start looking for new hosts. Can you recommend any good ones? It’s been a while since I’ve looked at hosting but back when I chose my current hosts (2008!) I was advised that it was best to use UK hosting for a UK audience (I think it was for SEO). Is this still the case?

I usually build smaller sites (I’ve previously built a couple of fairly light blogs and a couple of html single page websites). I didn’t notice any problems with them. Can I definitely rule out it not being the theme that’s the problem?

• This reply was modified 8 years, 2 months ago by vw115.

You were advised correctly that you should be using a hosting provider in the area you’re serving, but it’s much more of a performance and latency concern than SEO, although there may be SEO benefits as well.

I don’t know what your budget or business model is, nor do I know how comfortable you are with different levels of server administration. I’ve gone through 3 hosts before I reached my personal favorite: DigitalOcean.

I’d actually recommend them for you as well, based on the fact they have datacenters in London, Amsterdam, and Frankfurt. You’d probably use London most of the time, but you have global options.

As for your theme, it can’t be totally ruled out. You could copy the site onto a localhost server on your computer and see if the performance issue persists. If it does, then it’s likely a theme scripting issue; if not, your host is to blame.

Another thing to note about DigitalOcean is they charge by the hour of use (up to a maximum monthly fee), so you can try it out (maybe on this site?) to see how it works. If it doesn’t work out, worst case scenario is you’re out a dollar or two. Here’s some of their info:

https://www.digitalocean.com/products/compute/
https://www.digitalocean.com/products/one-click-apps/

• This reply was modified 8 years, 2 months ago by Robert Stockwell.

Thanks for the advice Steve. I went to the hosts and (surprise surprise) after a day long wait the came back and pointed the finger at the plug-ins I have installed.

Thank you Robert. I could use MAMP to try the site on a local host server. I’ve never tried transferring them across. Is there a particular method you’d recommend for doing that?

I would start by installing a new instance of WordPress on your MAMP server. Then download the entire database via phpMyAdmin and the “wp-content” file folder. Nothing more or less. Replace the “wp-content” folder on your MAMP server with the one you downloaded from your host.

Next, you’ll need to edit your .SQL file so WordPress will work on your localhost install. Open the file with a program like Adobe Dreamweaver or TextEdit. Then use search and replace to search for “www.wardandsmith.co.uk” and replace it with “localhost”. Do not include the quotes, http, or any leading or trailing slashes. This is very important for data integrity and consistency. Save and exit the file.

Finally, login to phpMyAdmin to access your database. You’ll see there are already tables listed there; these relate to the fresh installation you performed on your MAMP server. Select all the tables and drop them. Then import the .SQL file you downloaded and just edited.

At this point, you should have a working local copy of your site on your computer. If links are saved in your theme’s files, it might take a little work to get them to work properly, but it will give you a good sense for performance issues.

If you still see a lack of acceptable performance, you can try a different theme, deactivate plugins, etc. until performance improves.