WebPagetest Forums

Hi everyone,

Our Wordpress site, https://internetmarketingmag.com, which is on our VPS has a very slow load time.

It's using a theme called Voxel running Gantry Framework which is made by RocketTheme.com.

We started out at about 20 - 40 seconds and then discovered that WP Piwik was conflicting with the other plugins, not sure which one. After we deactivated and deleted the plugin load times dropped down to 12 - 15 seconds. We then installed a optimization plugin called W3 Total Cache which brought it down to 8 - 12 seconds.

We're still concerned that 8 - 12 seconds is still very poor and are wondering what else we can do to lower it down to at least 2 - 4 seconds.

We've duplicated the site on our HostMonster shared account, http://1800stereo.com, but are still getting similar results.
http://www.webpagetest.org/result/150508_HA_CZZ/

We're all out of ideas and would like to get your help on this, please.

It appears your site will benefit from the following (best guess from external view) experiments...

1) Turn off your CDN + Load Balancers, these seem to be causing major slow downs.

A well tune server will perform as fast as using CDN/LBs (within a few milliseconds), with none of the cost or debug hassle of either.

2) Try tuning OpCache or APC to ensure high PHP cache hit ratio.

3) Turn on deep debugging inside MariaDB/MySQL + check your syslog + tune accordingly. Also be sure all your data tables are using InnoDB rather than MyISAM as the storage engine, as using MyISAM (default with many Hosting companies) will crush performance when there are many database records in a table + heavy traffic.

4) Ensure your system is using either ext4 or btrfs w/all access time accounting turned off in mount options.

5) Ensure /tmp is in memory + not on disk.

One or more of these ought to breath new life into your site.

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Oh... Run your site through XHProf to tell if your theme is really the bottleneck.

Because of the CDN/LB oddity on your site, wpscan returns no useful info.