I have a website (currently running at www.subspace.cz), which I spent some time on optimizing. There’s still some tasks to be done, like image optimization, but that’s not the problem I’m solving now.
The problem is, that it almost constantly takes 1.6 seconds before the page starts loading, ie. before the webserver starts responding to the request.
- I am certain this is not due to the hosting, since another website is also running at www.subspace.cz/trekken and is running fast. I also tried running this website on localhost on my i5 PC and the delay here is constantly 1.2 seconds.
- I also ran WP-Optimizer on the database
- I also tried switching the theme to Twenty Twelve and deactivated all plugins. The difference in the waiting time is insignificant, about 150ms.
It seems to me like the WP core has to be doing something that needs to be completed before the server starts responding… but over 1 second? Does any of you have a hint on what could be causing this?
Note: The admin section of the website is also affected by this waiting time.
Test the performance of installed plugins with P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler) that measures their impact on your site’s load time. Badly written plugins can vastly increase the server response time ( for example, i was unpleasantly surprised when I discovered that only one plugin, which is only used for galleries, consumed 500ms of server time on each request,
regardless of whether it was even necessary for that request ).
The delay is usually because of the time spent by server on executing the code and once the code is executed, it then responds with the relavant html/css. WordPress uses hooks, which means that everytime wordpress starts executing the code, it also has to execute all the code hooked into it, mostly by plugins. As Danijel mentioned, P3 Profiler can be used to check the performance of plugins.
Some plugins like woocommerce and acf are really heavy but you cant live without them, what you can do for this kind of situation is to use a plugin called “Plugin Organizer”. By using this plugin you can organize your plugins for special pages. This way woocommerce will only be activated on product, cart and checkout pages and wont effect the performance of rest of the website.