My website is slow

A slow website costs you visitors and customers. The cause is almost always the website itself: too many or heavy plugins, no caching, or large images. Sometimes your package is reaching its limits. Use the questions and steps below to find the cause.

Three questions first

• Is everything slow, or just the admin area? If only the WordPress admin area is slow, it's usually down to plugins, or a bot hammering your login page.
• Always, or only at certain times? If it's only slow at busy times, or when a scheduled task runs, that points to the limits of your package.
• Only for you, or for everyone? Try it on your phone using 4G or 5G, and ask someone else to check. If it's only slow for you, it's probably your own connection or VPN.

Step 1: find out where the problem lies

• With Resource Usage in DirectAdmin, you can see whether your package is hitting a limit, such as CPU, memory, I/O or the number of simultaneous processes (see Resource Usage: CPU, memory and processes). A message about faults means your site was throttled at that moment.
• With X-Ray, you can see per page which plugin, database query or external call is taking up time (see X-Ray: tracking down slow pages).
• With an external test such as Google PageSpeed Insights, you can see everything a visitor's browser has to load.

Step 2: the most common causes

1. No caching. Our servers run on LiteSpeed. For WordPress, the free LiteSpeed Cache plugin often makes your site much faster right away, because pages no longer need to be rebuilt on every visit.
2. Too many or heavy plugins. Every plugin takes time. Use X-Ray to see which plugins are slowest, and disable what you don't need.
3. Large images. A 5 MB photo straight from your camera will slow down any page. Resize images before uploading them, or use a plugin that does this for you.
4. Bots and attacks. Search engines, AI crawlers or login attempts on wp-login.php and xmlrpc.php can keep your package busy. Check the access log to see which addresses are requested frequently (see Site summary & logs: the error log and the access log).
5. An old PHP version. Newer PHP versions are considerably faster. See Selecting the PHP version (Select PHP version).
6. A cluttered database. Thousands of old revisions, spam comments or log tables make queries slow. Clean up and optimise the database (see Checking, repairing and optimising a database).
7. External elements. Fonts, videos, chat widgets and tracking codes from other parties can make your page wait. PageSpeed Insights shows you which ones are responsible.
8. Cronjobs running too often (see Cron Jobs: running tasks automatically). These also count towards the limits.

Step 3: is your package too small?

Have you cleaned up your site and turned on caching, but does Resource Usage still show faults at busy times? Then your site needs more processing power. In Mijn WebOké, go to My Products and Admin, then choose Change hosting package. An upgrade takes effect immediately.

Are visitors getting a 503 error or Resource Limit Is Reached? Then also read 503 or 'Resource Limit Is Reached': what now?.

Tip: Is the WordPress admin area slow while the front end is fast? Then take a closer look at plugins that do a lot in the admin area, such as statistics, backups or security scans that run on the server. Schedule heavy tasks for quiet moments.