overview

There are a number of frequent reasons that might lead to site slowness.  The most prevalent causes are listed on this page, along with some tips for speeding up your site.

Testing your site from external locations

When you notice site slowness, the first thing you should do is test your site on a third-party website. Several websites offer online tools for evaluating website performance. These can be used to see if the performance difficulties are occurring across the board or if it’s just your connection.

Tools for loading a website
If the site slowness appears to be occurring in all areas, follow the steps below to troubleshoot your site.

Databases

Databases are at the heart of the majority of slow-loading websites. The content of the database is not kept on the web server. Unless this site server has some form of caching enabled. If no caching is enabled, the communication between the web server and the database server creates content dynamically for each visitor.

Examining database overhead
If your MySQL database has a lot of overhead, it may operate slowly. Excessive “overhead” (unused empty space) in your database tables might cause queries to the database to take longer, and the webserver to time out before receiving a response from the database server.

For extensive instructions on how to optimize your database using phpMyAdmin or SSH, see the following article.

How can I make my database more efficient?

Ascertaining that your web and database servers are housed in the same data center.
Customers can choose between two data centers provided by GreggHost:

Ashburn, Virginia, United States of America
Portland, Oregon, United States of America
Visit the Data Centers page to see which data center(s) your account is using.

Both the website and its database are housed in the same Virginia data center in the screenshot above. Here’s how your panel should appear (although the data center may be different).

To avoid any networking delays, your web and MySQL servers should ideally be placed in the same data center. If you go to that page and discover that these two servers are not in the same data center, use the Contact Us page to get in touch with support. Support will be able to move your servers to the same location at that point.

Currently, all email hosting services for email addresses (made on the Manage Email page) are only available in Portland, Oregon (USA). This, however, has no bearing on the performance of your website.

Checking the PHP version

Make sure you’re using a supported and up-to-date version of PHP if your site is created with it. Newer versions of PHP are faster and smarter than earlier versions, and they can manage challenges emerging from increased traffic more gently.

Please see the following article for further information on determining which version of PHP you are using:

Identifying the PHP version used by your website
It may also be beneficial to boost the amount of memory available to PHP. You can do it yourself by changing the memory limit directive in the php.ini file. For further information on how to extend this restriction, see the following article.

The PHP Memory Limit Can Be Increased

WordPress One-Click Install

Checking the WordPress version
If you used GreggHost’s One-Click Installer to install WordPress, updating it is simple. For more information, see the following article:

How to have your One-Click WordPress installation update itself
I’m looking for any plugins that haven’t been used in a while.
Even if a plugin is set to inactive/disabled, its files can still execute code and harm the performance of your website. If you can’t get into your software’s administration area, try logging in through FTP/SFTP/SSH and removing any plugins you don’t use. This may assist in reducing your usage to the point that the admin area can load. Check out the following articles for help connecting to your domain through FTP/SFTP/SSH:

Plugin management in WordPress
Plugins for caching and anti-spam
In general, minimizing the amount of plugins you utilize improves the efficiency of your installation. Adding anti-spam and caching plugins, on the other hand, can help your site load faster.

Checking your server

It’s also possible that your server is experiencing a temporary load, which is causing the site slowness. Take a look at the following article for a list of commands you can use on your web server:

Troubleshooting commands for your websites

Checking for over-browsing by specific IPs

If one (or a few) IP addresses account for 10% or more of your site’s visitors (1,000 or more visits out of the last 10,000), examining the IP address’s hostname usually reveals that it belongs to a search engine bot, most commonly from Google and Yahoo. The rating of your site is NOT determined by these bots. These bots will occasionally attempt to surf your site hundreds of times each day, degrading its performance and preventing legitimate users from reaching you.

In the following page, you’ll find instructions on how to discover which IPs have recently visited your site and how to block them:

Using SSH to view and examine your access log

Using ping and traceroute

Run a ping and a traceroute to check the response time and connection between your machine and your GreggHost servers. Take a look at the following articles for further information on how to perform ping or traceroute:

Obtaining Ping Results and Tracing the Route
If you notice any problems, contact customer service and include the results of these tests. Support will then be able to check into the situation further for you.