I have a wordpress site and sometimes when logged in to the admin it can be quite slow. I’ve attached an image to show what i mean. The first request waits for about 8 seconds before anything else happens, a lot of the time that is about 2.5 to 3 seconds wait. Then all of the other requests get blocked for several seconds.
I do have quite a few plugins (26) could this be the reason or is it something else?
What’s actually going on here and what I can do to improve it as much as I can?
Update:
I’ve deactivated all of the plugins and activated them one by one. The two that seemed to have the biggest effect was Advanced Custom Fields and Use Google Libraries. Here’s what i found.
These are the requests and time to load the index dashboard page according to the net tab of firebug.
With no plugins activated
26 Requests
6-7 seconds
With all plugins activated
64 Requests
13 Seconds
With all plugins activated but the two mentioned above deactivated
36 Requests
8 Seconds
If i activate Advanced custom fields
55 Requests
11-12 Seconds
If i deactivate ACF and activate Use Google Libraries
53 Requests
10 Seconds
In response to the op’s comment:
The use of google api’s should save you time and effort, not cost you time and effort. You can load them in one of your theme files (ie functions.php) like so
(note: I took part of this from another answer I submitted recently. The thread can be found here.
As for the Advanced Custom Fields module, what are you using it for?
What are you using for cacheing? Do you have multiple cache / performance / or even SEO plugins installed? If so, disable all of them and re-enable the most suspect ones one at a time.
The best first step to take in a case like this no matter what is to disable ALL plugins and check to see if the problem still exists. If it does still exist, you likely have a server configuration problem, or a wordpress core problem. If the problem goes away, you are halfway there. Start re-enabling modules one by one and check to see if the results fix the problem.
Running a large number of plugins will hit your performance on some level, but most plugins aren’t that heavy duty. If one of your plugins is causing an issue with WordPress, however, it could cause this very issue.
If you are running cache plugins, are you using it for all of your pages? You might be causing an issue. None of the admin pages should ever be cached, really, since you should only have a limited number of users who have access to /wp-admin to begin with.