Yep. That’s the life of a WP dev.

simplest way to debug this is to create a folder named disab inside the plugins folder, move all plugins to that folder then enable one by one and test. The one which slows down everything is your culprit.

I had one special case…

So, my wife’s friend launched an online store for ordering customized ecological trinkets, from pens, keychains, writing blocks, notepads, you name it. Everything with eco-friendly materials like cork, recycled plastics, and so on.

The initial team she hired made her website as she asked, I believe, but somehow they ended up not keeping up the site in working conditions. Which ultimately was preventing her from selling stuff and running her business. The lack of reply, very poor support, was making her miserable..

She rant about it with my wife when she reminded her to talk to me about it, so I could check out her website. After I got the login details from her, I was amazed by such crappy job.

I don’t even know where to start…. WordPress version was WAY outdated. The theme required at least one paid plugin to work, a page builder. Almost every plugin was outdated and with the “update” option enabled and screaming UPDATE ME PLEASE!

Then, there was another issue. Her store was based on quotes, not on a fixed price. So she wanted her site to reflect that, from the product gallery, to the “buying” and checkout procedures.

She told the previous team she wanted that, but as they were not replying and giving 0 support, ofc the site was not as she wanted.

The plugin page was lit up like an xmas tree… Update links, warnings everywhere. A total mess. Where should I start? After explaining the whole situation to my wife’s friend, she gave me green light to do what I deemed necessary to make it a fully functional website with an online store.

First step: update WordPress and existing plugins to see how it will reflect on the frontend.

After updating WP itself, a new ton of updates were available. Great. One more round please…

With everything updated, I noticed some stuff stopped working. I don’t remember exactly what, but the site frontend was no better. Strange artifacts, unformatted text, stuff like that. So I had to dig deeper into it and start to disregard plugin by plugin. After removing some unwanted and not-necessary plugins, I found the culprits were two:

The actual theme in use and the page builder “supplied” with it. As buying both was out of the equation, considering what she wanted to achieve, I recommended the total removal of such contents and the rebuilding of the site’s pages with a free theme. The same theme I had in use in my own design & photography website. She was not convinced it would work, but she told me to do it anyway and anything would be better than what she had.

After setting the whole thing with a sample page, she was taken aback with the cleaner results and page loading speed.

After building up the other pages, contacts, material galleries and so on, we focused on changing the store behavior to Quotes instead of Purchases. I found a simple plugin just for that and it was done. These days, WP already had the option to auto-update every plugin, so I turned ON that option for every plugin.

She paid me, altough I made her a special discount against her will…

Later, she was complaining about the access times and I recommended her the host I have my websites on. I always recommend them because:

1) they have a GREAT support at an excelent price package

2) I earn a small comission out of it, but it needs some time to build up and actively earn something

Again, she was a little reluctant from the start because she never had issues with the hosting. Until they did. After migrating everything, again, she was amazed by the speed difference and the no-pain transition. She barely noticed it. The migration process was very smooth and now her website is running very much ok. She has a novice guy working with her changing a few stuff here and there, nothing too technical, and helping her by adding products too.

Everything that needs problem-solving, thats where I come in.

I work with small businesses. I’ve seen WordPress websites with dozens of outdated plugins, sites running WordPress version 5.0 (or less), themes that were depreciated years ago, ancient versions of PHP, I’ve seen it.

I generally just do complete rebuilds given a lot of these sites are so old and ancient that it’s a lost cause.

Sure. Had a would-be client with 80 plugins on their site. During the onboarding meeting, they were complaining that their prior agency took down the site all the time. They also didn’t want me to set up a local or staging environment, and just cowboy everything out on their live e-commerce site. I politely declined to engage.

My WordPress plugins updated for the first time recently and made things incredibly hellish. I deleted a couple plugins that were problematic and copied and pasted some HTML instead. 

It’s a consequence of the “I need to make this button red, I bet installing these 10 plugins will do it” approach.

Be prepared to walk away if it’s too much. I happily walk away from work all the time if it’s too small, going to take up too much of my time and not pay well.

I started specializing in this 10+ years ago and there’s honestly nothing I enjoy more. Opening a slow, old WordPress site that someone else built is like a cross between a crossword puzzle and CSI!

In my experience plugins themselves are rarely as big a problem as they’re made out to be. (Not saying they’re not a problem, just not the boogey man.)

In general, the big problem with plugins tends to be redundancy, irrelevancy, obsolescence, or abandonment. That’s usually pretty trivial to handle.

A bigger problem is !#% that gets larded into commercial and agency-built themes. Especially themes that have been abandoned by the original vendor, but also “custom built” themes where the original developer has ghosted. I’ve mentioned the “no-plugin” site I had to deal with several times recently: there were “no themes” because the sophistimacated programmagers who built it had shoved a nulled copy of ACF from 2015 into the functions.php file. The less said about that the better. (The agency had the audacity to claim their enormous ongoing hosting charges were do to their cutting-edge optimizations!)

In general, though, once you clean out the genuinely useless plugins the real problems tend to be

* unoptimized images and videos served from the media library
* slow or bad hosting (usually shared hosting but there’s also bad “VPS” and “managed WordPress” hosting.)
* bad or no caching

By the way, I’m not knocking all agencies, or commercial theme developers, or even all amateurs (who sometimes go a little wild adding plugins.) I only get called in for sites that have obvious problems.

But to answer your question, cleaning up and modernizing old sites is way more interesting than building new ones.

I only use plugins with updates within the past 6 months. Used to be 12 months.

That’s just business in any proper web dev environment. Not only WordPress . I have seen nightmares built with react/nextjs/ headless setup. And others too. But that’s why some devs charge peanuts because they create potato salad in backend – indirectly costing the client and their business

I recently inherited a group holding website last week. Similarly story. Close to 40 plugins. Lots of unnecessary custom code. Elementor build. Quite a mess. A lot of plugins from unknown devs , which is also scary.

So we will start cleanup process . Test and clean and test and clean. (Rinse repeat)

Then fix optimization and assets

Then brings only necessary plugins.

But eventually. We will suggest a rebuild from scratch. Because the foundation and core is weak. With all the bloat sitting somewhere in database and installs.

Your issue was probably more related to a cheap host witg lacking performance, but you spent time optimising too much instead of getting your client of the shitty server.