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I have a few sites which are exhibiting a slow load time. All are WordPress 3.5. All are hosted through BlueHost. All are developed by me (built as child-themes of existing WP themes).

Using Safari Developer tools, I see that they average 4–6 seconds (not ms) of latency before anything happens, which appears to be abnormally high. I've tried to wrap my head around latency, and I know I'm not the only one to ask about it here ... but I cannot figure out if the primary culprit is my hosting provider (Bluehost) or with my development.

Here are a couple of my sites with issues:

http://www.HubbardProductions.com

http://www.xla.com

Can anyone point me in the right direction? What can I do to reduce the latency?

Chris Anderson
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    Have you tried creating a simple static page on the same hosting to see if that loads quickly? It almost certainly will, but it's worth trying for troubleshooting purposes. You also have some errors in your markup. – Chris Herbert Jan 09 '13 at 17:51
  • I have tried calling a simple static page and it does load quickly. So it isn't an obvious "my hosting provider is terrible" issue. What errors have you found? – Chris Anderson Jan 09 '13 at 21:35
  • Run your sites through a validator and see the errors for yourself. However, that's probably not the sources of the problems. As I said below, it's probably database performance. Have you tried any of the big caching plugins? – Chris Herbert Jan 09 '13 at 21:37
  • Use this code to see how many queries you are making: num_queries; ?> – Chris Herbert Jan 09 '13 at 21:41
  • Thanks for your help Chris. I have added WP Super Cache and that does seem to eliminate the heavy database lag -- hooray. I'd still like to optimize my site(s) performance and not just rely on the cache. Where are you recommending I add that code ... and where would it output the number of queries? – Chris Anderson Jan 10 '13 at 15:24
  • Optimizing performance isn't easy. If the cache works for you, I'd just stick with that. – Chris Herbert Jan 10 '13 at 20:34

2 Answers2

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Chris, same problem here. Also with Bluehost + Wordpress 3.5.

Some minutes ago, my sites even went down, and I was unable even to access cPanel. I received the following error:

Auth failed69.89.31.120:2083 is temporarily down.

I contacted the technical staff and they told me to try again, deleting cookies, and also sent me this url:

https://my.bluehost.com/cgi/help/481

Which, in my case, is of little help, but perhaps it can help you.

I asked them if there was any problem with the servers lately and they said nope, no issues.

So, to answer your question, I would:

  1. Wait a few days, in case it is temporary (I hope).
  2. If not, I would run some tests with simple html pages, then php, then php + simple SQL, etc., to find the bottleneck, and if it is a server issue or a wordpress issue.
  3. If I find it is a server issue, I would complain.
  4. If everything fails, I would move my sites to other hosting. Bye-bye Bluehost. :(

Good luck!

Eduardo Iriarte Gahete
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you can see from here. your website is responding lately. https://i.stack.imgur.com/FGaDE.png

http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/jyKI0Kv01/http://hubbardproductions.com/

ahmetlutfu
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  • Thank you for the kingdom.com resource. When I test the original theme on which my child is build (http://www.kriesi.at/themes/choices/) it has over 90 requests ... but loads much faster. I'm primarily concerned with the big yellow line (waiting over 6 seconds for the server). What is causing such a long wait? – Chris Anderson Jan 09 '13 at 20:39
  • I agree, I don't think it's the number of requests that's the issue. My guess would be that database performance is the problem. – Chris Herbert Jan 09 '13 at 21:34
  • yeah this issue is not related requests counts. I got screen captured.your website is waiting around 3.5 second for first step.http://i.imgur.com/VIVoq.png – ahmetlutfu Jan 10 '13 at 07:26
  • I've added WP Super Cache and that has eliminated that database lag ... but I'm still sorting through what might have caused the lag in the first place. But the cache might prevent this community from troubleshooting now. Good stop gap ... but I'm still doing something wrong. – Chris Anderson Jan 10 '13 at 15:27