Extremely slow loading times.

[IainTraynor]

Pages on my site www.homesecurealarms.co.uk take at best (and very rarely) around 6 seconds to load which is acceptable as it's on wordpress, at worst it can be over 60 seconds, most of the time it's around 30 seconds. I've seen complaints on here before about page loading speeds and some people moving their hosting elsewhere because of it. I have had issues before where the site produced a 404 error constantly for around a week when I had a basic site on the basic hosting package, nothing had been changed on the site, all of a sudden it started working again, was definately a hosting problem.

The speed is in no way acceptable and it is not my internet connection as it has been checked on different computers on different broadband connections. Are BT's servers slow ?

Can anyone advise, pleeease.

Iain

[Sogo7]

Firstly...

You're running a Wordpress site, that means every time somebody asks for a page behind the scenes the CMS (content management system) has to make a lot of requests to the database in order to build the page before sending it to the visitors web browser. This means a WP site will allways be slower than a hardcoded site, like most things in life it's a compromise. In this case the ability to easily edit the page content makes for a slower site.

Wordpress Plugins.. these are also known to cause slow loading times depending on what they are doing behind the scenes that said one may actually help .. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-super-cache/installation/  but it's a longshot.

Secondly... Optomise your images, convert them from png format to jpg or even gif to reduce thier filesize. The three in the slideshow are the biggest culprits as each is over 100kb in size. Images not sized correctly  before use also cause problems like this one http://www.homesecurealarms.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/visonic-big.jpg is 700px × 700px being scaled to 310px × 310px inside the vistors browser.

Thirdly....

You could probably/ should  lose the cookie script as it's not really doing much as it appears google analytics is handling the visitor profiling/ stats.

PS: you are missing the  title information on several pages and Google hates that sort of thing when trying to index a website

EDIT:

The 'about us' and 'testamonial' pages  load reasonably swiftly it could well be that service contact form creating mischief

[IainTraynor]

Thank you so much for your reply and for the details regarding problems with my site, I have passed your findings on to my web designer.

I emailed support last night and I have received a reply saying that they have had a few other customers reporting similar issues, so it may be that there is a general problem at the moment. This morning it was 6 seconds load time for my homepage, a couple of minutes ago it took over 30 seconds.

Thanks for your help.

[Sogo7]

There's always going to be some variation depending on the number of sites using the shared web servers and the SQL database server at any given time, other webmasters performing data backups may also cause brief periods of slowness.

Badly formed database tables created by other users can also cause high useage spikes that upset everybody, the problem should resolve shortly as most hosting providers come down hard on users exceeding the server resources policy.

PS: don't be to harsh on your web designer, as the pair of you are probably still making final small tweeks to the site some elements may not have the final 'web polish' just yet.

[IainTraynor]

When accessing the Wordpress login or when making changes within wordpress, sometimes it takes minutes to update or it times out alltogether, would this point to a slow server ?

[Sogo7]

Something is amiss that's for sure and perhaps time BT's own staff joined in? it being their 'Business Support' forum & web servers that are rapidly looking to be at the root of the problem.

Would advise somebody takes a look at the raw access  and error logs for the domain as these document the comings and goings of all web traffic both in and out of the site along with any errors that may of occured. You can get at these yourself via the domain control panel and are plain text files however they will compressed using the linux .gz format so a windows PC may need additional software to un-compress them.

I'm by no means a Wordpress expert and often bounce the odd question off one or more of the many dedicated forums they have, however I do have several WP sites running across the web with many using free web hosting (widely regarded as having  bloody awful overloaded servers ) and none of them exhibit the kinds of problems you are having.