WordPress sites on Stablehost are very, very slow! Help?
 

I host a few personal blogs for my parents along with a few other WP sites on the middle $5.95 Stable plan from Stablehost, and since they've been up I've noticed the sites have been really, really slow to load.

GTMetrix has them in the 8~13 second range sometimes.

I've also tried the tips outlined in this thread (password protect /wp-login.php on all blogs + cache plugins) but that hasn't shown to do anything to speed up load times.

I originally moved the sites over from Hostgator after they moved to their congested Utah datacenter with the hopes of speeding up these sites but they're just as slow now, if not slower.

My question --

Are the slow loading speeds because of the shared plan I have now? Should I upgrade to the more expensive $9.95 Plus plan, or will the Enterprise plan be my best bet?

Or for that price, should I be looking at other hosts like Mediatemple, ect? I'd like to keep costs as low as possible, but obviously having these sites load faster would be a huge help.

These sites don't get much traffic, but I'm afraid the excessively slow loading times are affecting their place in the SERPs, as Google doesn't generally like slow sites.

Thanks. :congrats:

Have you asked anyone at StableHost to look at them?

Also, could you give a list of the plugins/themes you're using?

Do you have a ton of commands inside of your .htaccess files?

Would you be able to either post or PM a link or link(s)?

Hey Brent, thanks for the reply.

I actually haven't contacted Stablehost about this yet. Will be doing that next.

Here's my mom's site: http://secretosdelalma.com

Most of the other sites are very similar to that one in terms of design, and are all on the Genesis framework. Here's a list of plugins on this blog:

• Acunetix WP Security
• Ad Injection
• Akismet
• CloudFlare
• DB Cache Reloaded Fix
• Genesis eNews Extended
• Genesis Slider
• Genesis Style Select
• Google Analyticator
• Google XML Sitemaps
• Hello Dolly
• Hyper Cache Extended
• Jetpack by WordPress.com
• Shareaholic
• Simple Social Icons
• WordPress SEO
• WP Smush.it

I have about 5 other blogs very similar to this one in terms of layout/theme and plugins, and they're all loading in the 6-12 second range.

So I simply assumed that it had to do with my shared host being the slow one. Although I would've assumed they would load a bit faster, since Stablehost advertises Litespeed and SSD drives -- yet they're as slow as they were on Hostgator.

I'll go ahead and open up a ticket with them to see what they say. :)

I am mobile at the moment, but wanted to reply anyhow. Judging by the number of plugins, plus multiple sites on a single plan, I be willing to bet that you're hitting some resource limits which is slowing the sites down. I'd recommend looking at multiple shared accounts or a reseller account to split them up into their own accounts. I'd also recommend removing any plugins that aren't absolutely necessary.

Also get that ticket in with StableHost so they can take a look.

Thanks again for the help, Brent, especially while being on the go.

Stablehost support has instructed to disable all the plugins and retest load speeds.

As it turns out, I was able to cut one of my sites from ~9s down to ~3s or so. After enabling them one by one, it looks like Shareaholic and Jetpack are adding the biggest slowdowns.

Still tinkering with the site, but it looks like it was due to the plugins.

Does ~3 seconds seem alright for a WP site on shared hosting?

Welp, there ya go! :congrats:

As for the 3 seconds, it depends. Next I'd work on making sure images are optimized properly, the site is leveraging caching and compression. I would revisit the guide you mentioned earlier now that you've found the problem plugin.

-Brent

I'm late to the party, but still have some input. :)

Remember that WordPress plugins are NOT professional releases, but rather the input of both pro AND amateur coders. And thus, some plugins are really crappy. Spaghetti code, looping code, code that makes too many calls, etc.

So here's a few quick rules:
- StudioPress (Genesis) and Yoast plugins are usually quite good. So you can trust those.
- "Security" plugins are often useless, and don't really provide security.
- "Sharing" plugins usually make many calls to a database, and slow sites down as a result.
- The most popular caching plugins are currently the worst ones (W3TC, Supercache)

Useless:
Acunetix WP Security
WP Smush.it
Hello Dolly
Jetpack by WordPress.com -- resource pig!
Shareaholic -- resource pig!
CloudFlare

Excellent:
Akismet
DB Cache Reloaded Fix
Genesis eNews Extended
Genesis Slider
Genesis Style Select
Hyper Cache Extended
WordPress SEO
Google XML Sitemaps

Not sure off-hand, would have to research: ... thought right away, I can see these may have potential db call issues!
Google Analyticator
Simple Social Icons
Ad Injection

CloudFlare usually slow down sites, unless the host is just really crappy (EIG aka Hostgator/Bluehost/etc), legacy Godaddy, etc. Beyond that, it only helps with static content (image), not the page loads. Try to remove CloudFlare from the equation.

If my sites load slower than 1s, something is wrong. (Forums get 2s, because the code base is meatier.) To me, a WP site loading in 3s is still unacceptable when it's cached. An uncached WP could have 2-3s. But you should NEVER not cache whole sites, just exclude pages from a cache.

Don't rely on Smush.it, etc, as it's nowhere near as good as manually compressing images with Photoshop or a similar image program.

Some of your pages do load quite quick after the initial load (i.e., local cache). So that may point to images.

My Spanish is so rusty. I've forgotten too many verbs. :unsure:

Wow, thanks for that excellent rundown!

I've certainly noticed the biggest slowdowns have been coming from Jetpack and the social plugins.

Although since this is my parents' sites and they really love Jetpack's real-time site stats, I've opted to leave that one on there. But I was able to really cut down on loading times by disabling all of the additional Jetpack modules except site stats.

The social plugins are a different story. I haven't been able to find any that don't add at least another second to load times. Shareaholic added a whopping 6 seconds by itself.

On my dad's site, Cupus.org, I've managed to get his at 500ms on Pingdom and 1.5s on GTMetrix which is a lot better. But I had to strip that one down completely. No slider, social plugins, nothing basically.

Like you said, it looks like the images are the biggest slowdown after the plugins. I'll have to manually optimize them myself when I have a bit more extra time to tinker with it.

But it's reassuring to know that the problem is on my end, and unrelated to the host.

Just a few weeks back I helped a good friend of mine set up a website for his company, and recommended he use Stablehost. The site has been loading at 13 to 15 seconds since it's been up. Now I know it must be the plugin-bloated theme from Themeforest we used. Guess I won't be recommending those anymore.

Once again, thanks for all the help. I originally went with Stablehost based on your previous recommendations on here and the WarriorForum, and now you've helped me get my sites loading much faster.

Hope you and your family have a Happy Holidays. :)

ThemeForest themes are pretty good, but it really depends on which ones are used. As mentioned, code can be from either pros or amateurs, and ThemeForest is just a sales site with themes from many authors. These days, it can be hard to tell if a person if an amateur hack or a seasoned pro.

It's not any worse than StudioPress. While those themes are often better resource-wise, they're terrible to edit. I've got one in use for my blog, and I honestly regret using it. It took much longer to edit, because it has a lot of proprietary "child" code running on top of the standard WP theme. It would have been much, much easier to customize a Theme Forest template.

Glad to see that this site is helping others with hosting, too. :salute: