LinaMininna

Why do you want this post closed?

I thought it might help someone else to know that changing hosts fixed the problem for me. I’m not a web designer or a professional by any means, but I’ve spent a lot of time and money trying to fix the website before I posted here. I changed themes repeatedly and spent money on good, optimized themes because that’s the advice I got from godaddy.

What’s more is that I’d never heard of the host I ended up with now. To be honest, I couldn’t care less who hosts my websites, as long as they work. Other novices like me are probably having similar issues with wordpress sites, and it’s worth a conversation, no?

I repeatedly disabled and enabled plugins, and spent a lot of time playing around in wordpress and on seo and website optimization blogs to see what would make a difference in speed.

In the end, I took the website as it was on godaddy, and moved it over without any further optimization or changes, and the difference is substantial.
It only goes to reason that changing hosts is what made the difference.

So, after trying all the recommendations I got here (thank you again!), and not seeing any significant difference, I contacted GoDaddy about it again – they, of course, suggested my website needed some more optimization.

I then contacted SiteGround, and started transferring my websites over.

Now torontodogwalks.com is loading at a perfectly acceptable speed.

I don’t know why I stayed with GoDaddy for so long. Ugh.

I’ve tested the site on GT Metrix, and I see that there is a long period of ‘waiting’ time, but I still can’t tell how to fix that.

Antonynz – thank you for the suggestions. The sad thing is that w3 cache has been disable for a few days now, since I’m actively trying to find the problem. So if it’s not the database caching that is causing the lag, what then?

I installed super cache, tried it out, and the lag time becomes even longer.

I also installed Gzip ninja speed, and it made a noticeable difference in the test results on pingdoom tools.

You’re definitely right about the other website – it’s not running on wordpress, and it super fast as far as I can tell. I’d love to get this website running the same way. What concerns me even more than the desktop version is the mobile version, which you can imagine is even slower than the desktop version.

I’m even willing to change hosts if it’s necessary.

Cyril, thanks for the suggestions.

Yes, i’ve definitely tried disabling everything. It makes a slight difference, but not much. I’m still getting the long lag before the website loads in the first place.

I’ve tried several different templates, in the hopes that if I just used a quality template that was light and efficient, it would speed the website – but no change.

What I have noticed now is that when I check it with the pingdom tool, i’m getting two separate urls – one www, one non-www. It wasn’t doing this before, but it looks like at least a few seconds of load time are spent on accessing the second url.

Under general preferences in wordpress, I have my preferred site set to the www version, and from what I understand it’s no longer necessary to add canonical redirects to an htaccess file since wordpress should handle the issue?

Also, the site itself is in a directory on the https://www.awalkapart.com main domain. Would that actually make a difference in load time?