A Plugin Broke My Site And I Can’t Seem To Find The Fix

  • jrodriguez1987

    (@jrodriguez1987)


    5 years, 1 month ago

    Hi, about a year and a half ago, I decided to make the switch to SSL. It didn’t jive with my WP install, so I used an SSL insecure content fixer to solve the problem. Shortly after using the plugin, I noticed that Facebook was no longer grabbing images. I though, that’s fine, I’ll manually add them.

    Over time, my website has been on a steady decline. Server usage is all out of wack, when I create ads on some platforms, the ads are declined because the site is not working properly. Most recently, when I write articles and go to add an image, I cannot access the media library. I ham having to add images to each post. Not to mention, any time my site gets any decent amount of traffic, the server goes down due to high memory usage. I’m at a loss!

    I have no idea what the plugin did but when traffic started to slow down, I deleted it hoping that the problem would be solved. That did nothing! The steady decline has taken place for the past year now and I’m afraid that the website that was doing great a year and a half ago that I have worked on for 7 years is slowly dieing on the vine. Any help that can be provided to help me troubleshoot the issues would be greatly appreciated.

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Joy

    (@joyously)

    5 years, 1 month ago

    There’s no magic bullet. It could be one thing or multiple.
    Start with the Health Check plugin to see what it finds.

    Thread Starter jrodriguez1987

    (@jrodriguez1987)

    5 years, 1 month ago

    Thank you!

    JNashHawkins

    (@jnashhawkins)

    5 years, 1 month ago

    I don’t like sites running infinite scroll…

    When your site started out it probably had a few posts and probably grew to a couple pages which infinite scroll most likely dealt with easily. I loaded your first page and cursored down and then wound up with 20 pages loaded and was barely into November…

    Yeah, that’s me ‘Over Loaded’ with visuals and content. Too much to take in… I’m wondering how much that affects your site’s apparent speed.

    I’d turn off infinite scroll and set my pages to around 15 to 20 posts each. While you’re there cursor down and set your number of posts in your feeds to 25 to 30 and make those ‘Summaries’ instead of full posts. That might help a little bit and bring anyone using a feed reader on your site back to the site itself to read more. That’s where you really want them.

    Next, you might want to install the Broken Link Checker to help you find those posts that refer to links that are not working anymore.

    https://wordpress.org/plugins/broken-link-checker/

    Caveat: Broken Link Checker is a resource hog itself with it’s out of the box settings. I usually throttle that thing back from 72 hours or whatever it shows up with to 480 hours pretty quickly.

    And the images? You have a huge number of images. Look into ‘Smush’ to try to pare down those image file sizes. That right there might help with your media system issues.

    https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-smushit/

    So killing the infinite scroll, ridding your site of useless, broken links, and Smush will probably get you started.

    You might next want a cache plugin and I’d spring for a CDN that will work ‘hand in hand’ with that plugin to take a bunch of the load off your host.

    https://wordpress.org/plugins/w3-total-cache/ paired up with KeyCDN would be my choice as the fee to get started with KeyCDN is very reasonable.

    At this point or shortly after all this starts helping your site, you can look at maybe a better server or putting Cloudflare out front.

    Caveat: CloudFlare will tend to amplify slow server response issues with 500 errors. If you see that you’ll need to turn off the proxy side of Cloudflare for a while. You’ll need to find some more horsepower and then turn Cloudflare back on. I know you probably like the idea of your own nameservers but that might be horsepower your server needs for other tasks… stay on CloudFlares DNS!

    Same with running email and anything else like ‘cron’ from your web server. That’s possibly a visitor waiting or a 500 error ready to pounce.

    Here’s a website that might help you benchmark the improvements as you go.

    https://tools.pingdom.com/

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • The topic ‘A Plugin Broke My Site And I Can’t Seem To Find The Fix’ is closed to new replies.