Extremely slow checkout process (Place order COD takes 80 seconds

Hello Team,

I’m experiencing a critical performance issue on my WooCommerce store.
• Issue: When customers click on “Place order”, the checkout request takes about 70–80 seconds to complete. Previously, the same process used to take only ~15 seconds.
• Environment:
• Hosting: GoDaddy Managed WordPress
• Theme: WoodMart
• WooCommerce with HPOS enabled
• WP Mail SMTP configured with Gmail (OAuth)
• WP Rocket for caching
• Troubleshooting already done:
1. Tested with all plugins disabled except WooCommerce → still slow.
2. Switched to default theme (Storefront) → still slow.
3. Enabled HPOS and deferred transactional emails.
4. Verified no slow database queries (checkout DB time ~3.5s).
5. Query Monitor shows multiple slow external API calls to GoDaddy services (api.secureserver.net, categories.api.godaddy.com) during checkout.
6. These API calls add 60+ seconds to the order creation time.

It seems WooCommerce is attempting external requests triggered by GoDaddy’s system plugin (gd-system-plugin / wpex) during checkout.



Thank you for your assistance.

• This topic was modified 6 months, 3 weeks ago by Steven Stern (sterndata). Reason: formatting
• This topic was modified 6 months, 3 weeks ago by Steven Stern (sterndata). Reason: removed redundant url

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