Please Help Me Troubleshoot Why My Site Is Loading So Slowly

My website is http://secretpassagesbooks.com/. It runs on the latest version of wordpress and is hosted via GoDaddy on a shared web server.

My website takes at anywhere from ten seconds to one minute to load, and I don't understand why. I have tested in IE, FireFox, and Chrome, and the page speed is the same. I performed several speed tests at various online speed test sites and have an average load time of 5 - 6 seconds. Yet when I click on a link to my URL or enter it directly it takes in excess of 30 seconds (sometimes more than a minute) to load the index page.

Here is what I have done so far to troubleshoot the issue:

• I have the YSlow and Page Speed extensions installed in Firebug
• Yslow test gives me a "Grade A -Overall performance score 90"

• My Page Speed a score is 94/100

• I have the W3Cache wordpress plugin installed and am using page, browser, and database object caching

• I've tried minimizing as much CSS and Ja开发者_JAVA技巧vaScript as possible
• The site is using HTTP compression

Is there anything more I can do with this design, or is it case of my shared web server being overloaded? Thanks in advance for all your help.

YSlow, etc detect problems in the HTML, Javascript and CSS parts, and these are probably OK. It looks like your hosting is to blame.

If those plug-in results are correct (and I've no reason to doubt they are), then it's most likely a case of your virtual server simply being overloaded.

I presume you have no such issues running an identical site in a "local" production environment either, although you might want to try this to confirm if you've not already done this.

Incidentally, a tale-tell sign of an overloaded VPS/shared hosting solution is if the first page load is incredibly slow, but subsequent loads are "normal" - a common reason being that your "decicated" sandbox is being awoken from a sleep/low resource state. (This also seems to be the case as far as your site is concerned.) As such, it's possible (I don't know the details of this server, such as whether you have a "guaranteed" resource level for CPU, memory, etc.) that other sites on this particular server are using more than their fair share of bandwidth until your site kicks in.

Based on some tests from a tool that I built (The Performance Grader at JoomlaPerformance.com), wow is it bad...

Notice that the HTML took approximately 21.83 seconds to download (from the initial request, to the last object being downloaded). Not to mention that the page is nearly 300kb (which is fairly large for only having 7 images)...

This is where the issue is. Notice that the connection and DNS phases are fine, but the generation phase is really REALLY slow. That's where your problems are. It's server-side. So, you need to debug why it's slow. Some areas to look at are the SQL queries that are being executed (and if they are slow), any slow plugins, etc. Try disabling things one at a time to see if each makes a measurable difference or not.

My "hunch" is that your database is either overloaded, or your queries are very expensive. So in short, you can try another host to see if that helps (which is the solution more than you'd think)...

As most of you pointed out, the issue seemed to be with the server. I contacted GoDaddy and explained the situation. It turns out that my site was hosted on one of their legacy servers and was most likely overloaded. They switched me over to one of their grid servers (no cost) and now everything is loading quickly. Thanks for all the responses. I spent a lot of time tweaking the design, removing plugins one by one, reducing as many HTTP requests as possible, and generally went crazy trying figure out how to best optimize my site. After a few days and a lot of tests, I could not accept that the problem was client-side, especially after all the optimization test I ran showed my site was ok. So good to have it settled...for now, at least.

GoDaddy's webhosting is the bottleneck to your website, you should probably go for a VPS if you have got an advanced website with loads of lookups!