What is causing such a long wait time on my blog page?

I have recently developed 4 websites in WordPress using the rtpanel theme framework.

When I put the websites live, I noticed that a couple of them upon clicking through to the blog page, are taking up to 25 seconds to load. (see link)

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http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/brQN7J/www.exactabacussoftware.com/blog

Can anyone tell me what is causing this long wait? If i change my theme back to twentytwelve it loads fine and the same applies on the other sites eg: http://www.exactabacusfulfilment.com/blog

The two examples are both running on the same server using the same theme but I cannot find out what is slowing the software site down so much.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

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3 comments

  1. It seems that PHP execution is taking lot of time. The analysis of your site shows that it takes around 22 seconds to generate HTML.

    There could be few reasons why php execution is taking time:

    1. You have activated some plugin which is causing your site to slow down.
    2. There may be some theme component which is causing your site to load slow.
    3. Your database queries are taking long to execute. (If this is the case, check why this is happening and you can enable Memcache to cache mysql queries)

    Install and activate P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler) on the website and find out which component of your site is taking the performance of the site down. To debug in detail, you can also try Query Monitor plugin.

    Once the issue tracked down and resolved, you may activate PHP-APC on your server if you do not make changes to the code.

  2. There are couple of really easy ways to investigate the reasons behind slow loads:

    The first thing that I notice is very high server response time (in my tests between 0.5sec and 1.6sec). This means that it takes at least 0.5+resource download time sec to load every image, javascript etc. If you have 100 resources this will take you 50 seconds or so which is a lot. So you might want to look for hosting alternatives.

    Google page speed will give you more details what could be fixed and improved look through it and try to solve those issues. It should help you to improve your speed quite a bit.

    • Another option is Google Chrome Developer Tools, Firefox Firebug or similar tools. Just open Network tab and reload the page, you will be able to see how long it takes to load one or another resource of your page.
  3. Another option is Google Chrome Developer Tools, Firefox Firebug or similar developer tools. Just open Network tab and reload the page, you will be able to see how long it takes to load one or another resource of your page.

    Building on that.
    It looks like there is 2seconds of latency before your server even answers the first GET request — followed by another 2 seconds that contain 84 more GET requests.

    Now, a 4 second load time isn’t awful, but if you want it to go faster, the best thing you can do is:

    1). Combine all of your javascript files into one file – making sure jQuery/other dependencies are first.

    2). Combine all of your PNGs into one file — a sprite — or, alternatively, Base64 encode them all.

    3). A lot of those pngs could be compressed — 5kb for an icon is a bit big. 66kb for an image is certainly too big.

    4). Same thing with your CSS — combine them all, and there will be fewer requests.