Wordpress site fast at first, then goes painfully slow

Web Performance Discuss Test Results
1

Hi everyone,

I REALLY need some help please. I have spent days now trying to establish why findmyjob.co.uk is running slow.

When the WordPress site is first installed and the Jobify theme is activated the site is fine; but, then it gets slower and slower.

After speaking to the host there doesn’t appear to be any server issues as there are lots of server resources still available.

I have rebuilt the site on different Windows hosting accounts; yet, no improvement. At first the site is fine, then it gets slower.

When I deactivate the Jobify theme and use the default WordPress 2014 theme the site speeds up to lightening fast immediately. Then, when I reactivate Jobify the site usually stays fast for a few hours. Then the slow down begins again.

I have run a test using webpagetest.org at: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/140608_YY_R00/

Two areas have been highlighted as issues:

1/. - First Byte Time (back-end processing): score - 0/100

13589 ms First Byte Time
ms Target First Byte Time

2/. - Leverage browser caching of static assets: score - 41/100

I have tried uninstalling all the plugins with no change. All that works is deactivating the theme.

If anyone could spare some time to help me get this sorted out I would be ‘very grateful’.

Thank you.

2

Do you have root access to the server? If so you’re probably going to need to install something like New Relic to help you track down the issue. There has to be code somewhere in the theme that is doing something painful (maybe tracking user history in the database or something like that).

You can also ping the guys selling the theme to see if they have a known issue or they know what configuration could be causing the issues you are seeing.

Since you nuked all of the plugins that pretty much just leaves the theme code itself.

3

Hi pmeenan,

Thanks for the support.

After a week looking into this matter I finally sorted it this morning; however, I couldn’t close the post here as my first post hadn’t been approved.

It turned out to be an RSS widget in the footer of the Wordpress site. I returned to my test score to see if there was anyway that I had missed a pointer to it in the test results; but, nothing pointed directly to the problem RSS feed that I could see.

The only mention of RSS I could find on any test page referred to the RSS image.

This topic can now be closed.

Thanks again.

4

Great, glad you tracked it down. It sounds like the RSS widget is populating the content directly on the server which is why it didn’t show up in the results.