I have a client that has an unbelievable slow page load speed. On top of that, the page loads as raw HTML first, then incorporates the style sheets, and then adds the visual assets. You’ll see this over the course of …. 6 seconds. It’s an ugly mess and terrible UX.
My first thought was that the site has a bunch of Js that’s unnecessary on it, hence why the site is performing so slow. I deactivate several unneeded plugins, and try to see if that’s made an improvement. Nope – still loading in the most ratchet way possible.
How do I go about diagnosing and then fixing it? Is this out of my scope as an SEO and do I need to consult a developer/agency? Everything on the technical and on-page side is looking par for course for the client’s industry but it’s just this awful tech stack (I believe) is causing some issues.
Thanks y’all in advance!
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Can you pass me a link? I will look into it.
Sounds like it could most likely be ~~garbage~~ cheap hosting.
You can get a plugin (i forgot its name) that will automatically run and disable pluigns one at a time monitoring the loading of the site to let you know what impact they have.
The alternative is to disable all plugins to see if that helps as it will narrow it down quickly (you can then renable them in groups/one at a time until performace tanks again and you will know what it is)
It might be better to run a site perfromace scan, lighthouse for example, as this will let you know whats taking so long to load. If its a file you can look at its path to see if you can narrow down which plugin it is.
It might also just be large images or as others have said naff hosting! but the above is an idea first to save moving a sluggish site over to new hosting.
You’re seeing a FOUC –
There are many reasons that it could be happening. You’ll want to tell us what hosting it’s using and provide a link.
There are all kinds of reasons this can happen and it’s hard to guess without a link… and almost always easy to identify if we have one.
The main choices would typically be
* genuinely awful hosting — the solution would be to move to better hosting
* severe server malfunction — the solution would be to contact the hosting company’s support team
* Some kind of runaway “blocking” code, often by tracking codes inserted in plugins (or tracking codes within libraries used by certain plugins.) — The solution would be to disable all plugins and switch to a generic theme, then enable them one by one again till you see what’s causing the problem.
But most likely, based on your description
* Bad caching either from a plugin on the site or on the server side. The solution here could be as simple as clearing all caches, disabling some or all caches (because duplicate caching can make things way worse), checking cache configurations (because some caching plugins are notoriously complex and certain choices can make things much worse), or changing to a more “hands off” caching plugin like WPRocket that does a lot of its own configuration.
A lot of us “site rescue” types deal with all of those problems fairly often. But again, it can be hard to say for sure if we don’t have a link to your particular site.
Pass the link let me look into it to see if I can help
Have a couple things I could recommend you to try
Go to GTMetrix and run a test on the site. It will give you colour list of things that are taking a long time. Look for the longest and slowest problems and post them here.
Depending on the amount of traffic the site gets, a simple test to start is to try switching the theme to one of the default WordPress themes to do some quick page load tests to see if the problem persists (you may want to do this at off hours to reduce the chance of any user seeing it, or if the site is high traffic this may not be an option). If it does not, you know to look for an issue within the site theme. If it does persist, there’s a good chance it’s either a plugin or the hosting.
For assets to load as slow as you have described it is pretty surprising. It’s silly and maybe a long shot, but make sure you aren’t using the browser inspector with throttling on. Throttling down to 3G or slow 4G will create a similar experience.
Here’s my self-written 67 page performance guide. This will most likely solve your issues. When I had my site up I was just absolutely committed to the best page speed, you won’t find a more detailed guide with as many solutions as I found anywhere.
This was my site’s speed:
If you still have issues remaining after implementing everything in my gdoc, it’s definitely your hosting. Following the guide will remove pretty much any problem from the WordPress side.