Website management tips

My author site The Last British President has been suffering from extremely long load times and time-outs recently, sometimes with 404 and other error messages, which is a serious problem for any website and a complete turn off for visitors.

I'll point out that I'm on shared hosting for the site, as are this forum and Compufix.

The problem at hand was 100% physical memory (out of 512mb) usage and I/O usage, as per this image:

My first port of call was the plugin section, so I disabled them one by one, but this made no difference at all.

Then I went to the image section and deleted all unused images and resized some to more manageable sizes - no difference.

I also changed the memory limits in the wp-admin-php config - no difference.

Finally, I managed to get onto my hosting company in the US, Godaddy chat, but they had no idea what the problem could be. Helpful but dim, finishing with 'have a wonderful day!'

I then made a cup of tea and began to realise that the problem was intermittent with spikes all over the place, as per these images for the last 24 hrs and 7 days:

I then tested with GTmetrix analyser (which Godaddy uses also) and the site was taking 60s to load, but I couldn't see any errors as such.

Google Insights is also a very good analyser and comes up with much better suggestions.

I then carried on with my Googling, and on Quora, stumbled upon a post where bots were mentioned, so in a last ditch attempt (prior to resetting the entire website), I changed my cPanel password that I'd left unchanged since installing WordPress and designing the site.

Success!

Since this is the only change that has fixed the problem, I can only assume that a bot of some kind was strangling the site. I may be wrong, but that's my conclusion for now.

Very useful information if such a pestilential nuisance should ever hamper this forum.

Quote from alexmorco

Here are some important tips that will help in decreasing website loading time,

1. Check the image sizes and compress them to the lowest size

2. check if there are no java script issue

3. test the website with Google site speed test tool and fix them accordingly as guided.

Another important part is hosting company, might be you are using shared hosting that always can be a cause of heavy load time, I would suggest you to choose Cloudways fastest WordPress hosting services and check the loading difference.

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That would be Google Page Speed Insights alexmorco

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

After some further tweaking

I do indeed use this and am tweaking the homepage to improve load times.

I try to keep all images below 100Kb and yes, I am on a shared hosting plan with Godaddy, so I'll look at Cloudways when my plan with Godaddy is up for renewal next January.

Many thanks for the tips.

I've just redesigned my Compufix website and all that's left to do is to go SSL (https).

I've added a new service, VHS tapes to digital media which is proving quite popular.

http://compufixshop.com

Quote from Richard Pedersen

"I try to keep all images below 100Kb and yes, I am on a shared hosting plan with Godaddy, so I'll look at Cloudways when my plan with Godaddy is up for renewal next January."

I'm sure you meant KB (kilobytes) instead of kilobits. (Kb)...

I stand corrected, Richard.

Edit

SSL activated.

I've redesigned the Compufix website and now it's available in both Spanish and English, through a system of smoke and mirrors.

All that's left to do is complete the SSL for the English site, then write it up for DCT, where I'll divulge the secret of how it's done.