TL;DR – A blog I used to write for was given to me but it has so many issues and every dev I’ve hired has been a waste of $ and I don’t know how to fix the problems.
Edit: website is
I wrote for a music blog for a few years and in 2020 the owner said he didn’t care for it and I was the only one writing so I could have the blog. I made some small changes (theme, better hosting, etc) but there’s so many issues I can’t fix or find dumbed down instructions for.
I’ve hired a few wp devs (or people that claimed to be devs) and gotten 0 return. Is there a place to get help on WP issues for someone that doesn’t know anything about back end shit?
The website load time is really bad, there’s a lot of unused CSS files apparently slowing it down, website barely gets 3k hits/month.
If anyone can point me in the right direction I’d really appreciate it.
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Is it using some kind of builder theme?
Send me a pm, I can definitely help you out.
Here is what I would do:
1. figure out how many plugins I don’t need and disable them.
2. update WordPress
3. find a new lightweight theme that doesn’t use add on page builders.
4. add caching to your website
Sounds like the site needs a rebuild. Given it’s an old site and there’s a lot of issues after switching themes…the cleanest way is to migrate the blog posts and info into a new site and apply your new theme and start building out pages. If you’ve gone through multiple devs and are not getting support – it’s probably a pain in the ass given the budget.
If you had posted the link to your site, you’d probably get people to try and give you free advice specific to your site.
Honestly I’d completely bin that site. It’s not only that it’s slow, it also looks pretty bad, doesn’t function properly and the amount of ads would make me leave immediately. You also mentioned in another comment that you cut down the plugins from around 60 to around 20. For a site like that you shouldn’t need more than 2-3 plugins. Tops.
Obviously you can backup the posts and migrate them to the new site. But any developer who knows what they’re doing would tell you to just build a new site instead of fixing the existing one. Which shouldn’t take more than 2 days. Max.
From the front end, it looks quick.
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1. Check your WordPress memory setting sometimes they are set to 64M
2. Install query monitor and see if there is a plugin that is causing the big slow down
3. Check Chromes waterfall feature to see if there is something loading that is holding up time
Need more information.
I’m assuming that since you posted this you’ve done quite a bit of work.
For me at least, the site as a whole is now incredibly fast and I think I saw somewhere in a comment that you bought a new theme (I’m guessing it’s the one on there now?). I like it. Seems to work really well and is easy to use.
You mentioned you’d got the plugins down to 24 from 60-something (great job, and i dread to think what was going on with that site when it had 60 plugins). I’d say that you should be able to get that 24 down to well below 10, easily. Especially considering this is a blog, and not an overly complex website (as an example, a large highly custom ecommerce site I look after has a massive amount of features and still only clocks in at 16 plugins – still too many for my liking, but they’re there out of necessity since coding the same functionality would be too much work for little benefit).
If you could provide a list of the remaining plugins you have installed/active, we could definitely let you know which ones can be removed / what alternative solutions there might be for some of them.