WordPress extremely slow loading site on first visit

Question

I have a WordPress site that is running on an Amazon EC2 instance behind a load balancer.

Checking Chrome the initial connection is around 1 minute, before it proceeds to download around 3mb of content and display site.

Have a load balancer redirect setup on port 80 (HTTP) over to 443 (HTTPS) also in Route 53. Subsequent loads are fast - assume because of cache. But struggling to figure out what is causing it.

Simply typing pacificmh.com.au into the browser will obviously attempt to load the HTTP version of site (?) Which hits a 301 redirect to HTTPS and after some time will load.

• https://pacificmh.com.au/ will give a certificate error NET::ERR_CERT_COMMON_NAME_INVALID
• https://www.pacificmh.com.au/ is the only URL that will load quickly and correctly

Tried adding a load balancer redirect from 80 over to 443 to force HTTPS? But doesn't seem to resolve the slow loading.

I feel like it might be to do with the certificate not covering non www version of site and load balancer redirect is to https://pacificmh.com.au not https://www?

Answer 1

I've tried to load both urls:

• https://www.pacificmh.com.au/
• and https://pacificmh.com.au/

both load similar "fast" to me, but I'm not in your region. The certificate issue seems to be fixed with a wildcard certificate. So you need to have a certificate for every DNS entry or a wildcard (as you have).

The AWS (!) setup itself looks sound from what you describe and should't introduce any latencies. If there are latencies and slow loads I would search between ALB and EC2 and inside the Wordpress setup itself.