What To Do if Your Blog is Slow

The first question asked on my recent post, WordPress Questions? Ask Them Here, is from Eugen Opera. He asks:

What would you do if the blog is running slow?

Good question, Eugen! There are so many things that can slow down a blog, and most of the time, they’re small things that can be easily eliminated.

You can read my thoughts on the subject in my post, A Few Tips To Speed Up Your Blog’s Load Time, on BlissfullyDomestic.com.

Some fellow bloggers have offered to help answer your question, so without further ado…

Firas Steitiyeh of SteitBlog offers these words of advice:

I would say the first thing I will try to do is to disable all the plugins and reactivate them one at once and test the loading speed after each plugin re-actived just to try to know where the problem is! If it still runs slow, then it doesn’t have to do with the plugins, I will be using different criteria; which is to use firebug and know which file is taking much to load, sometimes slow-loading blogs is caused by 3rd party links such as (Google AdSense, Chitika, or any file that is hosted externally). By doing this criteria it is most probably that the user will be able to allocate the reason of the problem and then fix it.

Most likely, what makes wordpress blogs slow varies between; extra lines of code, extra database queries, 3rd party links and of course piles of unused plugins.

Firas has offered a link to a post he wrote on this subject and I recommend you take a look!

Eight easy ways to speed up your WordPress blog

Firas Steitiyeh is a 25-year-old Jordanian Tech guy with a huge passion for the Internet and Technology. He blogs about technology, blogging, and social networking on his site, SteitBlog and is also a regular contributor at Mike’s Life. You can follow him on Twitter @steitiyeh

Graham of AllThingsGerman.net says:

1. External references in the theme

I know some social media plug-ins load their icons from external sources, and even pop-ups like Amazon Associates uses IFRAME. These are, of course, fetching their data from an external site and the blog is possibly waiting for it to load before it completes loading itself. These tend not to be too slow, and after all, you actually want that content on your site.

But what some services do, is require you to add scripts into your theme, especially into the footer. They may be using this for legitimate reasons, such as checking your stats, but if their server is not up to it this is going to slow your blog down. And it’s really annoying, because the content appears to be there, but the browser is still loading.

The obvious solution is to remove such code, if you can. It may be a case of weighing up the speed of your blog against making money with an advertiser, but in that case you need to explain to the advertiser that he/she is not helping themselves by slowing down your access times.

2. Hosted MySQL

The back end of WordPress is the MySQL database where everything is stored, which means that the speed of the database is critical to the site. If your provider hosts several thousand databases on one database server, then you may only have a small fraction of the processing time for your database calls. Providers do this because they many people want MySQL functionality, but do not necessarily use it.

I know that some providers are receptive to bloggers contacting them about this, and may well take action to have the blog on a less over-loaded MySQL server. But eventually the time and traffic will come, when you may need to consider moving to your own server with hosting and database capabilities. Even if you use a virtual server, this should mean a lot faster database access times, and you are more flexible about your hosting as well.

Graham Tappenden is a self-employed IT consultant and British ex-pat living in Germany. He blogs about his life in Germany at AllThingsGerman.net and about IT topics in German at Computius. You can follow him on Twitter @tappenden

Is your blog taking a long time to load? Try some of the tips above and come back and let us know if you still need help!