What a drag it is when your blog loads up so-o-o-o slowly. That was happening here at PageOneWithGary.com and I’m sure it was annoying to our visitors. Certainly was to me. So here’s how I fixed the problem – and how you can too.
THE CAUSE & THE REMEDY
It turns out that one of the plugins was slowing things down to a crawl so here’s how to firstly identify the culprit.
1. Deactivate all your plugins and see how much faster the site loads. Hopefully it’s nice and quick. If not, maybe the theme is a problem and you should look for another one.
2. Re-activate your plugins a few a time. I reactivated 3, then I checked the page loading speed by clicking on the link to a post I hadnt opened in a while. The reason for doing that is so it didnt load from the cache on my computer.
If I had wanted to be totally thorough, I could have emptied my cache first but I didnt bother and this method worked just fine for me.
3. Keep re-activating a few plugins at a time and checking page load speed each time. If it’s a problem with one of your plugins, when you turn on the offending plugin, your site will once again load slowly. Delete that slow-working plugin.
In my case here, the offending plugin came from FollowSite so I visited that site to see if anybody had found any way to speed things up.
Well, it turns out that the website at FollowSite.com would not even load.
NOT AT ALL.
No wonder my blog was so slow !!
***
Now that plugin has been deleted, we are back to regular loading times. And I’m very happy with that.
You see, when I started PageOneWithGary.com, I chose this particular WordPress theme because it looks striking and the picture tells a story of the exuberance you’ll feel when your site gets onto Google page one, but… page loading times have been atrocious lately.
Not anymore. Normal service has been resumed.
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Footnote: If ever they get things sorted out at FollowSite, I’d be happy to reintroduce their plugin and update this post. The FollowSite plugin helps visitors follow changes on your site.
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I had the same problem and had narrowed it down to the followsite plugin as well, which I googled and found your post. Pain in the a** and wordpress really should not allow it on their plugins list.
You CAN’t be serious!? I’ll know if you seriously don’t know the real reason WHY your pages load slow if you publish my comment. (I am a Programmer, not an SEO Expert)
Wordpress is PHP and MySQL and all of the requests and code are processed server side, not on the user’s side. Excess lines of code for redirects & database queries for just 1 page load request is over-working your server and causing slow page loads. Here’s why.
You are using a Permalink Structure that starts with a text based variable instead of numeric. WordPress has known about this problem since 2.0 and has added warnings for performance issues but they still allow this bad practice made popular by SEO EXPERTS. Do NOT use the Category, ever! This is the structure used by those “in the know” and those who disagree should be ignored.
http://yourdomain.com/wp-admin/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%-blog-post
Leah, a really big thanks for coming in on this one.
I’ve also seen some other folks recommend that we start post names with an incrementing number.
Gary