Really Slow Website

thetiger2015

Free Member
Aug 29, 2015
957
411
The load time on one of my websites has gone from less than 2 seconds to over 10 seconds!

Website is hosted on shared hosting but I've never known it to be this slow, it was working fine a few weeks ago but since then, an SSL certificate has been added and it just keeps getting slower!

Any ideas? This is what the homepage waterfall looks like, when in Chrome Developer Tools:

Initial Connection: 2.27 seconds (so even before we get to the SSL, the site is slow)
SSL Certificate: 2.23 seconds (seems to be taking a while)
Waiting TTFB: 6 seconds (what is this?)
Content Download: 1 second

There's a couple of javascript files that take around 2 seconds to download but I'm less worried about those.

Any ideas on why the above have suddenly become very slow?
 
Waiting TTFB: 6 seconds (what is this?)

Time to First Byte - normally if this is a content management system like WordPress this is teh time taken todo some database activities before the page is rendered.

It does rather sound like your host server is overloaded.

If it is WP then PM me and I will have a look ( no obligation or expectation )
 
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You could easily argue the TTFB was due to a code or DB issue with the site, however with over 2 seconds for connection and 2 seconds for SSL I can safely say your hosting provider is VERY poor!

And here's me struggling to get Google to stop moaning about a 0.43 Second response time, I feel sorry for you. LOL
 
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Can you share the domain, there are many reasons that can affect performance on a shared hosting server, simply an over loaded server can cause this problem. I personally think this cannot be due to SSL. If you share the domain we can test it at our end.
 
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The load time on one of my websites has gone from less than 2 seconds to over 10 seconds!

Website is hosted on shared hosting but I've never known it to be this slow, it was working fine a few weeks ago but since then, an SSL certificate has been added and it just keeps getting slower!

Any ideas? This is what the homepage waterfall looks like, when in Chrome Developer Tools:

Initial Connection: 2.27 seconds (so even before we get to the SSL, the site is slow)
SSL Certificate: 2.23 seconds (seems to be taking a while)
Waiting TTFB: 6 seconds (what is this?)
Content Download: 1 second

There's a couple of javascript files that take around 2 seconds to download but I'm less worried about those.

Any ideas on why the above have suddenly become very slow?

I don't think, website speed has gone slow because of enabling SSL but if you feel the same then you can take help of Http/2 for faster connection.
 
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Is it a wordpress site ?
Are the plugins up to date ?
Have you installed a cache plugin (I would if I was you)
Have you looked at the html to see if you can compress it ?
Have you compressed the images etc

Lots of reasons why it is slow - I can take a look at it - but I charge.
 
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If you are using cheap shared hosting, then this is most likely going to be the primary cause of speed issues.
You can circumvent this up to a point by using cloudflare.com

You will need to give the domain name in order to get more than guesswork. By default this site will not allow you to post links if you have made less than 30 posts, so feel free to send me a private message if you would like me to take a quick look for you.
 
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Worth seeing if you can execute a shell script (are you on PHP?) that will show you the load average of the server and free memory / cached memory. Assuming a linux type box, anything over 1 would tend to point to it being busy, over 2 for long periods and you're talking about too busy.
 
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Worth seeing if you can execute a shell script (are you on PHP?) that will show you the load average of the server and free memory / cached memory. Assuming a linux type box, anything over 1 would tend to point to it being busy, over 2 for long periods and you're talking about too busy.

For many modern shared hosting servers a load average of 1 - 2 (or even above 2) would be low and nothing of concern. However to interpret the figure more accurately you would need to know more details about the server, one rule doesn't fit all servers/workloads.
 
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The load represents the waiting processes, so on a 4 core processor, a load of 4 would indicate that each core has 1 process waiting. Any server with a ratio of more than 1 in processes to cores would have more work to handle than the processor can cope with. If that's happening regularly the server is overloaded. As you're on a shared server and have no control over it, you really want the load to be low most of the time otherwise you'll regularly be at the mercy of load fluctuations due to spiders crawling the sites or other odd peaks in traffic.
 
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