Extremely Slow Loading

Everything takes forever to load-in admin and on the my site generally..I looked in Forums and found the following fix-but it is YEARS old. Since I’m new at this I am afraid to try it…anyone else have some ideas? Thanks!
http://www.cole-collective.com/
If you want to keep wp-shortstat enabled but don’t mind losing the country information you can comment out the following lines in the plugin by prefixing them with //

$coinfo = @file(‘http://www.hostip.info/api/get.html?ip=’ . $ip);
$country_string = explode(‘:’,$coinfo[0]);
$country = trim($country_string[1]);
like:
//$coinfo = @file(‘http://www.hostip.info/api/get.html?ip=’ . $ip);
//$country_string = explode(‘:’,$coinfo[0]);
//$country = trim($country_string[1]);