WordPress site terribly slow after recent WordFence update

Hi @trex556, thanks for your message and supporting information.

Whilst we are constantly working on making the plugin faster, perform better, and use less resources, there are not set amounts of RAM, CPU or database queries that we know Wordfence will definitely require in each use-case or hosting environment. The cases of slow-down are small in relation to the quantity of customers using Wordfence, but does crop up from time to time with certain configurations or larger databases/installed plugins.

As with the other ticket you mention, a diagnostic report could help us out. You can send one to wftest @ wordfence . com The link to do so at the top of the Wordfence Tools > Diagnostics page. Then click on “Send Report by Email”. Please add your forum username where indicated and respond here after you have sent it.

Note: For the fastest response time, please make sure and add any information or questions directly to this topic and not the email address above unless asked.

Many thanks,

Peter.

Thanks @wfpeter . Did this recent update of WF increase the needed resources to efficiently run WF? This is something that would be known by WF for sure.

Hi @trex556,

The latest release notes show our latest changes, which mostly revolve around improvements and smaller feature updates rather than radical overhauls of the scan process or firewall.

I have not received a diagnostic as yet, so I’m unsure whether you might be experiencing timeouts or connectivity issues that might explain why the site would slow down dramatically. There could be processes in the background with an extended timeout taking up resources. These aren’t always easy to spot but there can be hints in taking a look at this data.

Let me know if you send that over and I’ll take a look for you.

Peter.

@wfpeter I have been doing my own testing and it seems that the issue may be with the GTmetrix plugin possibly by itself or a conflict was introduced from the last WF update.

Comparing the results to Google PageSpeed and they dont match any where close, GTMetrix results from their plugin were way off compared to tests from their site. I have removed the GTMetrix plugin and just use their website now. I understand the two testing platforms use different modalities and therefore the results will differ, but GTMetrix went from ~1sec load time results to over ~17sec load time results after the update. Not right.

I have sent you the diagnostic report as requested.. but this does not include the GTMetrix plugin installed, I have uninstalled that already.

It is interesting that this happened just after the WF update, so there may be some conflict, I dont know. But based on tests from Google PageSpeed and load.io it seems the site is within acceptable load times.

I did notice that WF consistently slowed down the Google PageSpeed load time results by 10 points, taking the site from Google PageSpeed green 90’s to orange 80’s every time. Maybe there is some sort of tuning to be done to the WF settings? Any help there would be appreciated.

@wfpeter Seems to be happening to others as well…

Additionally the Google recaptcha functionality does not work for WooCommerce. When enabled it causes the “submit” button on the login form to become unresponsive.

Hi @trex556,

As with the topic you highlighted, you could also check the Wordfence > Tools > Diagnostics > Log Files section and send over the error log which was last updated on August 18th to wftest @ wordfence . com also. It isn’t necessarily recent enough an update compared to the date you sent the diagnostic to suggest there’s a constant ongoing problem but worth a look.

With GTMetrix, it operates like the “Network” tab of your browser to measure the delivery speed of site assets. The additional time could be because something it was measuring was being blocked and was timing out, hence the load time increase. If you perform an advanced search on Wordfence > Tools > Live Traffic for “User Agent contains gtmetrix” it would show up straight away any block reason.

It is possible there was a plugin conflict though, which we usually recommend a process of elimination for. In fact, we also recommend this for the reCAPTCHA issue you’re seeing too! Start by disabling all plugins except for Wordfence and WooCommerce, then switch to a default theme such as Twenty Twenty-One. If the feature works under these conditions, then re-enable your plugins one-by-one, and finally your theme to see when the issue presents itself and what is causing it.

If a plugin/theme conflict can’t be identified – or Wordfence/WooCommerce as the only enabled plugins still presents the problem – it could be worth seeing if your login page contains errors when you inspect the browser console. You can show us errors here with a service like Snipboard so that we can try to interpret what is happening.

Thanks again,

Peter.