2010 20/01

What To Do if Your Blog is Slow

By Erica Mueller
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Filed in: Blogging, Featured, Tips & Tricks, Wordpress

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!

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Robert Bravery

Good post,

I would also suggest too many and too big media files. Like pictures, music, video, etc. Check your theme design that it does not carry too many big graphic file sizes rlevant to the actual size of the graphic.

External HTTP requests is also a killer. You call it external referencing. But really it is all types of external http requests. These are requests via HTML or Java or some other script to external websites. Here you are at the mercy of the external webserrver and website. Which you have no control over. Allso the extra requests cause extra and time consuming hops over the network to retrieve the data. Lower these HTTP requests if you can.

Slow Database: Well this is a real conundrum. Many databases and thousands of tables can slow a website down. But it's not the datbase alone, but a combination of software, hardware and setup. 1000 databases and tables can run faster than 10 if hosted on a good machine and setup correctly. It also depends of the type and traffic of the sites being hosted. You can get good perormance out of many websites that have low traffic as opposed to fewer websites with huge amounts of traffic.

But Yes your point that shared database hosting can be a killer.

Also rearranging your code can give you the effect of a spedier site. Like putting requests into an iframe, putting such requests at the bottom of the site and dom model. Causeing these scripts to run last, gives the impression taht your site loads faster. Because people will start reading your site when it's finnished loading, unaware that at the end you site is still making external requests.

EricaMueller

Robert,

You should have been one of the contributors for this post! :-)

Thanks for all the helpful information!

Maria Shipley

I guess some of the plugins need to get unplugged.
Thanks for sharing!

EricaMueller

I like that! Let's un-plug the unused plugins and those that cause strife!

Graham Tappenden

Hi Maria - I just checked your blogs to make sure, and you only have the plug-ins activated that you actually use.

Mike CJ

Here's another tip if you use Chrome, and I do. Chrome is so fast that you may not even notice that your blog is slow to load. So every now and then test it on IE and you'll find out how most people really experience it.

Marko

Good piece of advice. Regarding slow databases - every serious blog should get decent hosting. You know what they say: You get what you pay for.

EDIT: oops, didn't really mean to reply to Mike with this comment, pressed wrong button.
By the way, good idea Mike :)

EricaMueller

Mike, IE is of the devil. Especially IE6. I use Firefox, but I make sure I test in IE too, cause it doesn't process a site them same. Microsoft, go away!!!

Marko, we use Rackspace for hosting and we LOVE it. You're right, you get what you pay for. I have a hard time recommending anything else to my clients because I know how overloaded a lot of hosts are. I've been pretty satisfied with BlueHost, but have had problems with everyone else I've worked with.

Mike CJ

Agree with both of you - I couldn't get over the difference when we switched from shared to a private server. It's expensive, but fabulous. Even at the height of the Beyond Blogging craziness the server just kept going.

Rod

Thought I'd share this great article from Problog Design,

"10 ways to speed up your wordpress blog"
http://www.problogdesign.com/wordpress/10-ways-...

I'll also add a tip of my own: Compress your images as well, I use a plugin called, "Smush.It" which does a great job and is light on your blog load. You can get it here; http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-smushit/

Enjoy!

EricaMueller

Rod, these are fantastic! Thank you!

Yes, compressing your images is one of my top recommendations. Most people don't know how. I mentioned in the article I linked to that one could use Picasa's free software... had no idea there was a plugin for WP!

Rod

No problem, glad I could help. There's actually a couple of plugins that compress images for wordpress.

Also, if you're a Firefox user, Yahoo has a set of tools that tell you how fast your site is and what to do in order to optimize it. It's called, "YSlow" which is an add on for Yahoo's web tool kit, Firebug. Just go here to get both: http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/

It's a great tool for web masters, bloggers, or web junkies like myself.

wchingya

Some really useful advise here. Fact is, we just never know when the plugins are piled up until too much to handle. I've had some issues with plugins in the past so now more cautious about whether or not to add, unless I need to. I've visited the page you suggested and quite a lot of advise given so thank you so much for directing to it. :)

Very informative blog and do keep up the good writing.

@wchingya
Social/Blogging Tracker

EricaMueller

Thank you so much for the kind words!

Yea, those plugins are great, but they don't all work together. When they start conflicting, everything SLOWS. I don't know how many times I've had to tell a client they need to get rid of a plugin they're addicted to, because it's slowing them down. The 'Share This' and 'Sociable' are the worst I know of. Sigh.

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