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[https://thehempcollect.com/](https://thehempcollect.com/)
hosted on wp-engine
50 plugins.
have some optimizing plugins installed it looks like, like 10 web booster.
i’ve just updated all the plugins and theme.
still sooo slow.
My first thought would be that the whole design needs to be reconsidered. too many widgets and pieces cluttering up everything. but could it be the host? the sql calls etc seem to be sooo slow to do anything, its horribly frustrating. any (constructive) advice?
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The thing with WordPress is that if it‘s well optimised and created correctly, it‘s lightning fast.
But if not, so if lots of plugins are installed and a page builder with bad DOM is used, the site will get very slow. You don‘t need 10 performance plugins. Nobody does. Having 50 (mostly) low quality plugins is a perfect example of how not to build a WP site.
Often it‘s easiest to just create a new site from the ground up (that’s what I‘d recommend), but you might want to try cleaning the old one up.
Work in a staging environment and analyze the reasons of the slow performance. Are all the plugins needed? How many scripts are they loading? Are the images sizes optimized? Are you using webp images? Are they using a CDN? Do they have a cache solution?
This are the basics, if the site is still slow, maybe you need a better hosting plan or change the pagebuilder, maybe use Gutenberg to improve loading times.
There is a plugin called asset cleanup that let’s you select the scripts loaded in each page, it could be useful but keep in mind that you are adding another plugin.
Breaking things in an ecommerce is quite easy: DO NOT work in production. Make a copy of the site and have a copy in a subdomain or in a local environment.
I use 50 plugins on my eCommerce site and it runs fast, no performance issues whatsoever. Might be the quality of your plugins. It could also be one plugin that is causing an issue. You can check using Query Monitor and see if any plugins are throwing a large amount of queries to the database.
Also you said the site is using 10 web booster plugins for performance? Usuaully you use one or 2 depending on compatability and features. 10 seems like conflicting issues might occur which can cause performance drops.
Install Query Monitor, look for code eval issues, warnings, errors, and long query strings. Look at the error logs. Run some speed tests. Do you have a long ttfb? What is the LCP load time? Have you preloaded it? What’s hitting cache what isn’t? Are you using a cdn?
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First, get rid of the optimization plugins. WP Engine does the same job (it’s one of the reasons it costs so much), and it’s better.
You have no clue what you’re doing huh?
WPEngine as a host shouldn’t perform terribly.
Your troubleshooting tools are Lighthouse in Chrome browser devtools and John Blackbourn’s Query Monitor plugin. Choose a particular sluggish page to study, and stick with just that page for a while. Run it with Lighthouse and study the output. and do the same with Query Monitor. Those tools should help you understand what’s slow.
And maybe post another question with a few more specifics.
Be aware that performance tuning is often an incremental process with a series of small victories, and be patient.
Step 1:
Plug-in audit
Step 2:
Install WP rocket.
I just visited and it doesn’t seem too bad. How can I replicate the slowness?
First, make sure the site is running on Wp Engine’s Advanced Network. You can tell under domains in the dashboard. There should be no need for any caching plugins since it would cause problems with the WP Engine server cache. Also, 50 plugins?! Yikes!
Yikes! Start by setting up a staging site and removing plugins not being used
>hosted on wp-engine
WP Engine is generally a quality host. Just make sure it’s not the entry-level account and the site is running out of resources.
>50 plugins.
It’s e-commerce, so I’m assuming Woocommerce. Everything for Woo is a plugin, so you’ll have a lot of plugins compared to a non-ecommerce site. This, however, is way too many. For reference, the sites we build on Woo usually have 15-20 total plugins. Sites we’ve taken over usually start out over 30, and we get them down to 20-25 plugins.
Lots of devs use plugins for every little thing. For example, I see Google Sitekit on tons of sites we take over. It’s ridiculously slow and kills your site speed. It’s also completely unnecessary.
Find out what plugins are actually being used and start getting rid of them. You’ve probably got a bunch of duplication.
What theme are you using? Is it set up with a proper child theme? Using a crappy theme is probably the most common cause behind way too many plugins.
Just fyi, I have a website with 50+ plugins and loads under 1 sec. So the number of plugins is irrelevant.
Find the problem, fix/remove the problem. Query Monitor, Health check & Troubleshooting helps.
Hey OP, I work at a WordPress marketing agency with almost 100 sites on WPEngine ranging in different performance brackets.
* Make a backup! wpengine usually keeps several days of backups with the site and database but if not make one manually.
* Start with a baseline: [https://pagespeed.web.dev/analysis/https-thehempcollect-com/sngbtwugbk?form_factor=desktop](https://pagespeed.web.dev/analysis/https-thehempcollect-com/sngbtwugbk?form_factor=desktop) , this will give you lots of things to target to improve later.
* Go through your WPEngine site settings and make sure the stuff you need is enabled. Check for caching, object caching, make sure your DNS network settings are pointed to the advanced network and not the legacy network. If you have the global Edge security addon use that instead of advanced.
* Copy the site down into staging/ dev so you can break it.
* Go through the WordPress plugins and figure out what is being used where, and if you can remove it, or consolidate features down to a couple of plugins. 50 Plugins is a lot, but not unheard of but I wouldn’t be surprised if several of them do the same things or have pretty big overlap. Since you are in the dev environment You can even just deactivate them all and turn them on one by one and see what they do.
* Personally I would avoid any of the typical performance plugins until you can see how you do without them.
* Once you have the plugins you need and have removed the ones you don’t need. Go through all the plugin settings and make sure they are configured properly, to the settings you need. You would be shocked how many people install a plugin and never check the options or features that can improve performance of those plugins.
* I use Local by flywheel (another wpengine company) to code locally on my machine. I can quickly pull down wpengine sites from any environment (prd/ stg / dev) and their database. You can also push up changes as well.
* Once you are comfortable with the local workflow I actually suggest getting at least the site theme under version control with a git repo. WPEngine has great instructions for connecting your github repo to the environments. From your github repo you can also start using actions to minify css/ js files, optimize images etc. The potential is unlimited.
* Even if you choose not to go the repo route, optimize the hell out of your images. Know when you should use png, jpg, and preferably webp when possible.
* when you have some stable improvements push them up onto the production site and reevaluate what your new biggest issues are.
IDK if this will be helpful at all, its not easy to pull a site back from performance hell, it has to be done a bunch of small sitebreaking changes at a time. Feel free to ask if you have any questions.
Send me a reminder by DM. I work for a managed WordPress host, I’m happy to take a look to see if there are any easy wins to boost performance.
To be clear, I’m not going to name the hosting company I work for or suggest moving the site. Just mentioned it since it means I do performance reviews of WP sites fairly often.
WP Rocket and WP Engine are best buds. Get rid of everything else and buy WP Rocket.
Check plugin settings. If you use widely used plugins, they should work out of the box and it should be fine. BUT… If anyone has changed any of their default settings without knowing, they may have screwed up something.
Treat WP plugins like React modules – most used ones are fine to use out of the box with default settings and they would work great. But if anyone trips some setting that they shouldn’t have touched, then things can go kaput.
check your slow queries. If your Latency is fucked, it’s almost certainly your db queries.
Quite often older sites have queries that look for the last ten items or something like that but the query collects all the items ever, sorts them then takes the last ten. You wanna change queries like that to limit the results.
And of course, the caching, the hosting setup, the cdn setup, object caching etc.
on an ecommerce site, the punters are often logged in bypassing alot of caching – it’s always worth seeing what can be cached.
I have to ask, having gone from WP to React – why are you doing WordPress / PHP work and not React work? It really is almost apples and oranges!
Ive been very happy with site ground hosting
WPEngine is fairly good. They also have a one click method for deploying a staging install.
Do that and run some GTMetrix reports while you take it apart and turn off plugins etc.
See what moves the needle.