[Resolved] Why is my site sometimes very slow?

[John]

Hello Folks !

A general question . . .

Why is my site sometimes very slow?

At times it is super fast.
I can move back and forth between
the backend and the frontend.

At other times is really slow.

Why?

Are these the factors involved:

— speed of network
— speed of my internet connection
— WordPress
— GeneratePress
— the complexity of my site.

Thanks.

[John]

. . . and of course another factor:

— the capacity and speed of my hosting company.

[David]

Hi there,

theres a lot of factors, that i could probably bore you with the mechanics of.
Instead a couple of questions:

1. Is there a noticeable difference when Logged In vs Logged Out?
2. Are there specific pages where the speed is noticeably slower ?

[John]

Ah, Dave, I would very much like to know the details.

If UC – understand-culture.com – gets legs, I’ll have
not only a lot of users. I’ll be creating research teams
who will be producing new content. And those folks will
be uploading content on the backend of the site.

You ask:

1. Is there a noticeable difference when Logged In vs Logged Out?

I haven’t paid attention to that.
But I will starting now.

2. Are there specific pages where the speed is noticeably slower?

Same.
I haven’t paid attention to that.
But I will starting now.

[David]

The details in as simple terms as i can muster 🙂

The starting point is the URL being entered into the browser.
The end point is the browser displaying the completed interactive page.

So what happens between.

1. The browser request has to locate the sites server.
Your ISP and all the other servers across the www networks perform the DNS lookups to find the site.

2. The Server having been found will do some validation, security checks (SSL) etc.
And if all good will make the connection to your browser.

3. The Server then processes the request.
The time it takes to do this, will depend on:

i) the servers configuration
ii) the complexity of the page being requested.

4. The resulting Data can now be sent to the browser.
The initial data is the HTML source code.
And this will include the links to each resource the page needs.
eg. Images, Videos, CSS Stylesheets, Javascripts etc.

5. The browser now makes a request for each resource
Resources from your server will begin loading without too much fuss. And you can see a lot load concurrently as you have a good server running HTTP2 protocol ( that allows unlimited concurrent connections ).
Resources from 3rd party servers such as a Google Font or YouTube video, will undergo the DNS Lookup, validation etc. as per the first request. And they take a lot longer to load.

6. Once all the resources are loaded the browser will process them and render the page accordingly. ( this is really overly simplified ). The more resources to load and the more complex they are the longer this can take. Especially if those resources are Javascripts as they have to be executed first and can result in long tasks for the browser.

At this point you should see a web page.

To put that into real world perspective, look at the Waterfall report here for your sites homepage:

https://www.webpagetest.org/result/230301_BiDcWQ_A0V/1/details/#waterfall_view_step1

Comparing to the above:
Points 1 to 3 is Line 1 of the waterfall the 3 colored bars. This is pretty quick. A reasonably good server that is close to my location , i would expect it to be somewhere between 0.35 and 0.75 seconds.

Point 4 is the Line 1 of the waterfall the grayblue bar.

Point 5 is all the lines below showing each of the resource requests.
Notice the ones being made to 3rd party URLs begin with the multi-color bar as they inturn have to process 1,2,3/
Notice the ones with the orange cross before them, as those are render blocking.

Point 6 not really well represented in the waterfall, except at the bottom where you see Browser Main Thread activity and Long Tasks.
Long Tasks ( in red ) are where the browser is processing Javascript, during which time it can’t do anything else. Such as rendering the page.

NOTE That this last point, the performance will be impacted by how much resources your local device has. A laptop for example with low memory, or one with memory being consumed by lots of open tabs or lots of browser extensions will perform slower here. Which may be the issue if you’re having slower responses in the editor.

But there is room for improvement on your sites performance, and i am happy to point you in the right direction.

[John]

Well, that gives me a serious impression of
your depth and sophistication of expertise
on this !

You write at the bottom:

“But there is room for improvement on your sites performance,
and i am happy to point you in the right direction.”

Yes, please give me any and all recommendations.
A blank check. Unsolicited advice. I welcome it.

I deleted your admin account.
Should I reinstate it or do you not need it?

John

[David]

I don’t need the admin account 🙂

1. Reduce the strain on the server with Page Caching.
Most hosts provide Page Caching. So check with them first.
If not you can use a plugin like this one:

https://wordpress.org/plugins/cache-enabler/

Note that page caching takes a snapshot of the page, so when making big changes to a site you may need to clear those caches or disable them.

2. Reduce the impact of 3rd party resources.
The main culprit here is YouTube videos. This plugin:

https://en-gb.wordpress.org/plugins/wp-youtube-lyte/

will load only the YT Poster Image until the user interacts with it, avoiding the need to load a lot of scripts unnecessarily.

NOTE: see my note on Perfmatters below.

3. Reduce render block resources

There are lots of plugins that can do this. My personal preference would be this https://perfmatters.io.
Brian the plugin developer is all about performance and his support is great.
He can help configure the plugin to achieve the best performance without breaking the site 🙂

[John]

Dave,

I just added WP YouTube Lyte
and immediately noticed the
value.

I then went to Permatters,
and understood what that is
all about and instantly see
it’s value … and at only
$25 per year.

Big thanks from me?

Question: Are you permitted to,
and do you offer technical assistance
to website-owners like myself, independent
of GP?

John

[David]

You’re welcome John.

Unfortunately At this time I am not taking on any other work, simply due to time restraints.

[John]

Got it.
Thanks, Dave.

[David]

You’re welcome John.
If you would like i can ask the team if anyone is available

[John]

Not yet, Dave.
Let’s wait on this.

Thanks !

John

[David]

No problem 🙂

[Author]

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