Why is my server response time ~4-5 seconds (Hosted on Digital Ocean)

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Hi, I’ve setup my site on a VPS and the server response time’s the only parameter which is actually slowing down the site loading time. I have gotten the AMD 7$/mo hosting package with 1GB CPU and 25GB SSD with 1k GB transfer, which should be enough for a site my size, since I don’t get much traffic yet.

Could anyone give advice what should I do to speed up the response time?

The site in question: [www.sensualselection.com](https://www.sensualselection.com) **NSFW WARNING!**

Thank you in advance!

https://preview.redd.it/qrxmwsn7ozmc1.png?width=804&format=png&auto=webp&s=d02c82a021aa6f52d82943be3cb454988cc97eda

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10 Comments

  1. 1GB memory isn’t enough to run WP on a VPS – bump that up to a 2GB server (minimum. 4gb for Woocommerce). For VPS’s, the memory you get with the server also needs to be used by the OS and the database, which themselves can consume several hundred MB. WordPress needs 128-256 ideally, so with 2 or 3 users, you’re going to run out of mem.

    And your page is 11MB – that’s insanely large.

  2. Unrelated but I can’t get to any of your dropdowns on the menu. When I hover they show but when I try to move down to them the drop down goes away. Take Our Quiz bar might be in the way?

    Firefox on MacOS

  3. Have you tested a basic html file. What stack are you running?

    I’ve ran 1g servers for years with nginx, php and MySQL

    Are you using a fire wall?

    Have you checked your browser to make sure it’s not set to mimic 3g?

    Is your server located near you?

  4. If you run GTMetrics or Page Speed Insights on the site you’ll get a ton of feedback.

    1. There’s a bogus redirect from http://www.sensualselection.com to plain old sensualselection.com. That’s causing almost a 2-second slowdown. 5.6 seconds for WWW vs 3.4! That… shouldn’t be happening.
    1. You need to add a caching plugin and/or server side caching (e.g. memcache) and/or a CDN. Your site is sending a ton of CSS files and chained Javascript, much of which could be deferred.
    1. You’re packing a heck of a lot of content onto that homepage. That gives you an “excessive”
    1. It looks like you’re running individual loops on different categories of products. If those are live and uncached (e.g. “most popular”) it’ll bypass caching and force a re-query on every page load. Consider dialing back a big and moving some of those rows into teasers/call-outs and move things to category pages instead of trying to show your entire catalog on a single page.
    1. 1gb memory shouldn’t be too bad for an ordinary brochure-style website, but I agree with u/bluesix that it’s not nearly enough for as heavy an e-commerce site as you’re trying to run.
    1. [edit: one more thing] Even though you’re using WebP format you might want to try optimizing. The one image I checked (clothingbg.webp) is 217kb, but when I re-saved it as an ordinary optimized JPG it’s only 107kb. That’s… also not supposed to happen. Try saving your images as lossy with no transparency. (When I re-converted that 107kb jpg to webp it dropped down to 25k with no appreciable loss of detail.)

  5. Additionally, your front page is far too large. There is just way too much there and should be cut back by at least 60%. You do not need to have every single thing highlighted along with huge CTA’s. A redesign or rethink of the home page is definitely in order.

  7. Disk i/o generally chokes websites. If your WP site is fleshed out and/or it has significant traffic, you would do better with an opcache + page cache setup. However beware – some caching plugins are very bloated and they may be problematic if you enable the wrong feature. You can just go with WP Super Cache with default settings by only changing ‘Only cache pages for logged in visitors’. That would give you the best of both worlds.

  8. Can you provide a list of the plugins installed? And also retest with Litespeed deactivated.

  9. I use DO through Cloudways which includes managed WP hosting and a really decent platform-specific caching plugin, similar to my go-to, WP Rocket.

    Have you ran a Pagespeed analysis? Here’s the report I just ran for your homepage.
    [https://pagespeed.web.dev/analysis/https-sensualselection-com/uyk17te1z5?form_factor=desktop](https://pagespeed.web.dev/analysis/https-sensualselection-com/uyk17te1z5?form_factor=desktop)

    This is what I use to start optimizations. You could do some work for both desktop and mobile.

 

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