[Resolved] Struggling with speed on a large site

[Author]

Posts

[jeanB]

Hi all,

I'm really struggling with speed, I'm not sure what's happening.
I have a very large site, that has never been speedy, but I have WPRocket installed which helps loads.
But for other pages, I'm struggling to get anything to load in under 30 seconds.
When I check Query Monitor, it's suggesting the get_posts query takes 12 seconds to load.

The thing is, it wasn't always like this - I've not changed anything at all, but its now insanely slow!
I've checked with my host and they're saying it's definitely the site.

It's running on a VPS (8 cores / 16GB RAM / 200GB SSD), so shouldn't be this slow! 🙁

Please help! 🙁

[Shane]

Hi Jean,

Thank you for getting in touch.

Is this a page that was built using Toolset ? Meaning is there a view on the page or is it a content template?

Also is the issue unique to this page or is it site wide. If its on a specific page could you send me a link to this page so that I can have a look ?

Thanks,
Shane

[jeanB]

Hi Shane!

Thanks so much for the reply.

Things aren't actually as bad as I thought, turns out I had another issue today causing large CPU usage, which is now resolved.

However, the site is still slower than I would like. It's a site-wide issue. I have around 230,000 posts, all tied together with relationships. I have lots of views and archives designed with Toolset.

The site is great when being served by WPRocket, but when it isn't brought from the cache, it's a little slow, especially on archive pages.

hidden link

(I have a Cron which loads up the main archive pages once an hour to make sure they're cached up via WPRocket as they're quite slow to generate.)

If you'd like an admin login, please let me know how I can send you those details, which will enable you to bypass the WPRocket cache.

[Shane]

Hi Jean,

This site is loading in less than 5s for me.

However I did a scan of the site with GTMetrix to see what else can be done and it seems that your images need some optimization.
hidden link

What you can do is to try using this plugin below.
https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-smushit/

Please try this and let me know if this helps. For now I dont think there is a major issue with the site load speed.
Thanks,
Shane

[jeanB]

Great stuff, thanks Shane!
I do need to optimise some images, you're right - I am already using Smush, but will need to manually optimise them further.

Thanks for your support and sorry to have raised a ticket when it was something else to blame! 🙂

[Shane]

Hi Jean,

Happy I was able to point you in the right direction on this one.

If there are no further queries on this one then you can go ahead and mark this ticket as resolved.

Thanks,
Shane