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I've been working on my WordPress Site for quite some time now, and it's about ready to be deployed. One major issue, though - it's VERY SLOW! At first I thought that the 20 second load time could be attributed to the 100+ images on each page; however, after some analysis, I've come to find that it's taking nearly 10 seconds for the server to get through its initial queries (before any content can even think about being downloaded). I am very new to the hosting game, and I know nothing about it. I've done my fair share of reading and I've come across the idea of moving away from my cheap shared hosting plan to a dedicated host over at VPS.net. Furthermore, I plan on integrating a CDN to increase the speed of all of the images loading up.

Two questions:

  1. Would switching hosts make the page load time go down to around 5 seconds (or less!)
  2. What are your thoughts on vps.net and their hosting options? Do you recommend any other hosts for a optimized wordpress site?

Thank you!

Evan

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    Who is your host?
    – Travis Pflanz
    Commented Apr 24, 2012 at 3:44
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    @Travis ipage.com is my current host.
    – Evan
    Commented Apr 24, 2012 at 3:46
  • I have never used ipage.com. I recently had slow loading times with one of my hosts. I switched to bluehost.com and haven't had any problems at all with their shared plan.
    – Travis Pflanz
    Commented Apr 24, 2012 at 3:49
  • Would you say that the way the page is loading could be attributed to my host though?
    – Evan
    Commented Apr 24, 2012 at 3:50
  • It is absolutely possible. My site was a magazine style site and it had a very large dynamic menu and many different areas with "Latest Posts" from many different categories as well as "Top Authors" and "Top Contributors", all dynamic. My old host told me they were limiting my service because of the number of database queries being used per hour.
    – Travis Pflanz
    Commented Apr 24, 2012 at 3:54

2 Answers 2

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I addition to the methods you have mentioned, the biggest way to speed up your loading time is with a caching plugin.

There are many in the WordPress Plugin Directory, but my favorite is Quick Cache.

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    I've been using wp-cache already and I've optimized all images using the Yahoo smush it plugin. I really think this could be a hosting problem but I was curious if there was some way to be absolutely sure.
    – Evan
    Commented Apr 24, 2012 at 3:57
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    Call the hosting provider and tell them everything you have done. Some hosts are eager to help, so are not.
    – Travis Pflanz
    Commented Apr 24, 2012 at 3:58
  • +1 on your comment for Yahoo! Smush it plugin - Thanks for introducing me to a new plugin that looks really awesome!
    – Travis Pflanz
    Commented Apr 24, 2012 at 4:02
  • Smush it looks good but if you have many pictures you should also take a look at spriteme.org The big sites use similar methods to merge all pictures into one and then use css to show parts of the big picture. The client only needs to request one (big) picture
    – offroff
    Commented Apr 24, 2012 at 8:34
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Cache

As an addition to @Travis Pflanz answer: Cachify does it all for you and is that well coded, that you don't even need to have many options. I run it on my own site (extremly bad mediatemple - currenty switching) and I'm highly satisfied.

Minify

What I'm also doing is minifying stuff with WP Minify (can't find the link). Also good is BWP Minify. Summing up your js and css files to single saves requests and therefore execution time as the server doesn't has to get asked.

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    Wow! Cachify made a HUGE difference! I still need to switch hosts though I'm afraid.
    – Evan
    Commented Apr 24, 2012 at 16:08

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