Hosting Issue With WordPress Plugins
 

All of my sites have been running slowly.

My host says it's a plugin issue that's making my sites run slow.

I have the following plugins.

Ajax Search Lite
Counterize (with all other plugins with it)
Google XML Sitemaps
PlugRush
SearchWP Live Ajax Search
WP-PageNavi
WP-PostRatings

Does anyone else have issues with their WP sites using the above plugins?

Thanks.

Counterize slows down blogs. Reduce the number of records it displays in options.

I use WP Cache on server

Counter plugins eat a lot of resources, man. WP cache just cache the static html, but counter plugins often use ajax (javascript) on client to query directly to your wp-ajax.php. You can view html source and can see that ajax javascript. (I am using wp-postviews)

Lots of good answers there. What happens if you have a timer at the bottom of your blog in footer.php such as;
Does anyone know if calls/lookups on plugins affect these numers (time and queries)? If so OP should be able to add this, switch plugins on and off and see how these are affected.

I also think hosting companies bullshit sometimes :)

test plugins with this from google https://wordpress.org/plugins/p3-profiler/

wp ratings has issues when the count gets large

I guess you are on some cheap shared account.

ask them to move your account to a server that isn't so fucking oversold.

You can reduce the load of the server with W3 Total Cache https://wordpress.org/plugins/w3-total-cache/

Take a look at this article that I've wrote a few weeks ago

Unrecommended WordPress plugins | StagCMS

exactly... because it mades mysql update query on every page load...
On high traffic sites it can make quite a load...

These caching plugins will not help in this case because counter is updated using AJAX and it will make database queries on every page load! Try with this plugin https://wordpress.org/plugins/db-cache-reloaded-fix/ (it's compatible with any other caching plugin) and if that doesn't work - you will need a better hosting... (check my sig :thumbsup)

It is probably the case, but if it's a high traffic blog these counters can make problems with VPS or even (lower spec. and un-optimized) dedicated hosting...

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.

Thanks. I removed counterize.

I'll give it a try.

Thanks for the link. I removed counterize.

That was one of the problems. They moved my account to another server last night. It made a big difference.

Thanks.

Great article.

My hosting company moved my account to another server which sped things up on my sites.

Some of the sites still loaded slowly.

I deleted counterize and Ajax Search Lite and SearchWP Live Ajax Search.

Sites were still loading kind of slow. Then I figured out the live feeds from AwEmpire was the main issue. Each live feed I had put a load of 5 to 8 megs per feed.

I had a couple of feeds on the footer so my pages were trying to load anywhere from 15 megs to 24 megs per page.

Everything's fine after I removed awe live feeds.

Does this work with WP 4? This has not been updated since 2012.