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Comment by com2kid | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like a good thing! My company's WordPress site[0] takes 4-8 seconds to load, with a couple paragraphs of text and a few images.

To be fair, I should really switch it over to being a static site, I am using a complicated templating engine to pop out a few paragraphs.

Of course that is the ultimate irony about WordPress. Like any other swiss army knife framework, it will always be slower than a proper dedicated tool.

Another issue (one that a lot of modern development practices share) is that WordPress lets you quickly pull in components to Get Things Done Quick, but those components pull in more dependencies. I was looking at adding some more smooth scrolling effects, and the suggested way was to pull in jquery (fair enough), even though the template I'm using already pulls it into the page. Repeat that a dozen or so times to get the page looking Just Right, and, well, there goes perf.

[0]https://www.thawd.net/

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There's no reason a PHP based site should take that long to load. It would seem that you are missing some caching settings, regenerating something every page load, or have something wrong with your server setup.

Make sure you are using a recent version of PHP and appropriate WP caching plugins.

Also check to see if your DB is hanging when a connection is made to it, perhaps due to trying to reverse lookup the IP for logging purposes and waiting for that to time out, or something else simple like that.

> There's no reason a PHP based site should take that long to load. It would seem that you are missing some caching settings, regenerating something every page load, or have something wrong with your server setup.

Out of the box settings, ugh.

Full second to parse jquery, 1/2 for jquery, 1/2 for jquery migrate. Something called wp-emoji-release.min.js is taking another 396 ms.

And this is after repeatedly visiting the page in my browser. I thought the browser was supposed to cache stuff? Heh.

Then again, according to Chrome, the page only took 1.4 seconds in total. I'm wondering where the remaining 4 seconds of me staring at an empty browser tab is coming from. :/

Then again, switching pages on my WordPress admin page takes ~6 seconds, so I think there is just a significant probability than my VPS has miserable performance.

Edit: Installing a caching plugin makes the page load not as horribly slow. It is at 3 seconds now, which is still 2 more than I'd like, but at least acceptable.

Look at the Cache-Control header and see if the site is telling the browser not to cache the JS.

Also, look at the time-to-first-byte . . . if that is high, maybe further tweaks to the cache plugin settings may help you. If you are not using at least PHP version 7.0 you will get a noticable improvement by getting to that as well.

Even with an online-shop attached (WooCommerce) + bigger product catalog it shouldn't take more than 1.5 to 3 seconds to load without optimization from my experience. Putting some caching in front of it further reduces loadtime. Cloudways is nice to manage WP, they just use a Digitalocean droplet and give you caching/Letsencrypt/updating pre-configured via a simple interface.

I'm not too happy with DreamHost's base level VPS. It makes the upsell to their own WordPress hosting solution feel rather suspicious.

Then again not having root on my own VPS, and having multi-week outages of the managed apps that supposedly are the reason for me not having root, also contribute to my lack of overall happiness.

That said, super nice support reps. Just wish they would actually fix my issues. :/

I think you're overreaching by blaming Wordpress.

By far, the bulk of the time loading your site is TTFB or Time Till First Byte for your website. That could mean that your hosting company is extremely slow, your theme is doing something very awkward, you have a million plugins running, or something along those lines.

Just use W3 Total Cache. I use it on my site and it works great.

e.g., https://johnrockefeller.net/block-all-web-notifications-in-f...

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