Knowledge base
My site is slow
Slowness has a small number of real causes and a lot of imagined ones. Here is how to find out which you have before changing anything.
Before changing anything, find out what is slow. The fixes are different and some make things worse.
Is it slow for everyone, or just for you?
Try it from your phone on mobile data. If it is fast there, the problem is your own network or your browser, not the site. This is worth thirty seconds and it rules out the commonest cause of a slowness report.
Is it the first page or every page?
- The first request is slow, then everything is fast - the cache is being warmed. Normal
- Every page is slow, consistently - the site itself is doing too much work per request.
- It is intermittent - usually a specific slow query or an external service the site calls
after a deploy or a cache clear.
on every page.
The usual causes, in the order they actually occur
- A plugin doing work on every page load. Related-posts widgets, live currency converters
- Caching turned off or not working. Check your site's performance settings.
- An external service the page waits for. A slow third-party script blocks the page even
- Genuinely too much traffic for the plan. Real, but far rarer than people expect.
and anything calling an external API are the repeat offenders.
though your server answered immediately.
What NOT to do
Do not install a second caching plugin. Two caching layers fighting is a classic cause of pages that are slow and serve stale content, and it is much harder to diagnose afterwards than the original problem.
Opening a ticket
Give us one URL that is slow and roughly when you noticed. A single slow page we can measure is worth more than a general report - and if only one page is slow, that itself is the biggest clue about the cause.
Still stuck?
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