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My Site is Down or Running Slowly, What Should I Do?
If you notice that your site is suddenly down or running slowly, this is a short checklist of what to do:
1. Firstly, it may be that your internet connection has slowed down or isn't working properly so run the site through http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/ 3-4 times for the most accurate result. If the site is up and working quickly according to Pingdom tools, the fault probably lies in your connection speed, not the website.
You can also check if your site is down for everyone or just you here:
http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/
2. If the site is slow in Pingdom Tools, check if you have recently added a new plugin or changed the settings on an existing plugin. While their functionality can be very useful, plugins can also cause a lot of trouble:
https://wpxhosting.com/knowledgebase/article/30/wp-plugins--can-be-great---terrible-for-your-site/
3. Next, assuming that your site is up but running slowly and you have not just added or changed a plugin, is to check the "Waterfall" feature on the Pingdom analysis of your site's performance on http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/
Here you should toggle "Sort by load time" and look at the elements of your site causing the biggest delays in page loading (the 'yellow bars') where you can see [a] the biggest drags on your site, and [b] how many you have which will cumulatively slow down your site a great deal:
If you have toggled the "Waterfall" results by "Sort by load time", you should see where the wait time is the slowest e.g. you may have too many gravatars on your blog. These can slow down a site a lot as each image has to be pulled from another server that is pretty busy and overloaded:
https://wpxhosting.com/knowledgebase/article/23/can-gravatars-slow-down-a-wordpress-blog-/
4. Assess whether you really need the elements (like plugins or widgets) that are slowing down your site so much. Alternatively, you can find different solutions that are more professionally coded and won't impact your page loading speed as much??
5. If you have an image-heavy website, it could be that you need to consider a CDN service to speed up image delivery from different servers e.g.
http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/
6. Other possible causes of a slow or offline website include:
- resource-hungry cron jobs
- theme coding/function issues
- large-scale site backups
- too many plugins installed on a website (it adds up!)
If you have followed the above checklist and still have site speed issues or your site is down, please contact us via a support ticket and we will investigate further ASAP: