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You're on shared/vps or dedicated...?
Get yourself this plugin: wordpress org/plugins/debug-bar
and check out this advices: wpoptimus com/527/debugging-tools-plugins-wordpress
Generally plugins can make your wp slower by i.e. making too much queries (or more than needed), this can be as well your theme...
- like imagine that you display links to posts etc. [wordpress loop] in multiple places on single page and theme/plugin is done in a way to make a new call/loop to get posts for each of these places aside, it's normal in wp but for example you can have one query and then filter it down in 5 places.
- if you're theme has 90 options (like display this icon, display that icon, display image left, right) it may be making a lot of calls to database on webpage load, if you're sure that you wont be changing these options a lot you could hard code them
- so there's a lot of reasons really, i think plugins and even wordpress design (it's not known well for being fastest/lightest cms)
There are multiple ways to incrase speed of your wordpress...
Checking if your site makes too many requests (this is general speed up tip)
- using chrome click any element on your site and click inspect element, then find 'Audits' tab, select 'Reload page...' and click 'Run'. This will show you if for example you dont have 20 javascript files and 10 css files loading, that's totally 30 requests and browser can handle just couple of them per host at a time, most of the time they (css/js) can be concatenated (so instead of serving 10 css files you use just 1) / minified
- use plugins above, and database queries (read that article) to see what's creating a bottleneck, doing most queries etc...
- make sure you use wordpress caching plugin, mentioned w3 total cache is quite good, but you should experiment...
- server side caching,
- which php version is running on server hosting your website?
create a info.php file, put this: <?php echo phpinfo(); ?> inside and upload it to your website root (for example), then open it up and see top header for php version...
There's a giant speed up in performance (especially of php/db) while switching to newer versions of php...
just some funny results:
PHP 5.2:
Direct method call: 8.3424661159515 seconds
call_user_func_array call: 26.904649972916 seconds
PHP 5.3:
Direct method call: 3.35181903839 seconds
call_user_func_array call: 11.5989868641 seconds
more illustrative (I cannot post images so have a look at this link):
www lourdas.name/sites/default/files/php53vs54vs55.png
If your website server runs php 5.3 instead of higher version then you're loosing around 30-40% of just php speed (and it use as well much more memory). This can be for many reasons, I'd say backward compatibility is most common "issue", for example there are many tgp/mgp or other scripts (lets say smart thumbs, comus thumbs or whatever) that require protected code loaders from Ioncube or Zend guard and actually neither of those two have "loader" files available for php 5.5.
So what I mean is that things can be on side of your hosting as well, especially if its cheap or shared account, but the moral is...
get yourself php 5.4 (at least) and nginx as a web server instead of apache.
this is huge speed boost if your site currently 'stands' on mentioned before apache and php 5.3.
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