Agreed, the current load times are pretty bad, but this isn’t a site that’s being hammered by thousands of views, so a cache really shouldn’t be necessary.
I just ran another test now: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/150405_74_PS3/
The time to first byte was reported as 22.833s. That’s almost 23 seconds before your server even responded with “Hello, I’m a server.”
That’s not a WordPress problem, or a query problem, that is 100% a server problem on GoDaddy’s end.
Blimey. But doesn’t time to first byte mean the first byte being received back on the browser, so this will include performing the queries plus all the other wordpress bits? The vanilla site is at http://www.radleyvillage.org.uk/supportTest and this shows a TTFB of 2-3 seconds.
Thanks again.
Well, to be fair, it depends on the server configuration I support. If it’s a bare-bones configuration, it will be the HTTP headers sent via WordPress. If there’s sever-side caching or server-side security, it will generally be HTTP headers sent via the server level (either via security or both via the caching layer).
So, yes I suppose a query could impact TTFB on a bare-bones server, that’s a good point.
At http://www.radleyvillage.org.uk/supportTest I ran the same test: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/150406_WW_4NV/
The report is showing TTFB at 0.874s.
Just for the sake of completeness, I ran http://www.radleyvillage.org.uk/ immediately after: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/150406_G3_4Q1/
The report is showing TTFB at 12.863s. (Interestingly enough, the TTFB on the repeat view is 15.520s, which means there is most definitely no server-level caching, and you would benefit from some caching. It wouldn’t be a night-and-day difference, but it would be less than 12.863s on the repeat view. But, let’s not worry about that yet.)
If these are both on the same server, then I’m going to guess it’s rather bare-bones, meaning the first byte is coming from WordPress. Which is unusual these days, but not unheard of.
Let’s try testing everything out on the vanilla installation. I’d recommend scrapping the current vanilla installation, then starting over with a new installation, the Twenty Fifteen theme, and the few plugins that provide custom post types. Then, try the normal import again, not the CSV import.
OK GoDaddy have confirmed the current live site and the supportTest site are on the same server and they have no caching set up so I think this correlates to your Bare Bones assumption in that TTFB is based on the first byte back from WP.
So I have spent a bit of time trying to populate the new vanilla site which I have repointed to radleyvillage.org.uk/rv – so far I have managed to export and import all Posts, Pages and Custom Posts. Had some probs with Events and Galleries but I can come back to these. So far so good, response times are good. I then installed and activated the Graphene theme – still good. I will progress the development of this although there is a lot of work required to bring things back in line – Menus, updating URLs, copy over all media (assuming I can just use the file system to do this). Styling etc. Each step of the way I will check response times as I could end up doing all that and switching plugins on as required and end up in the same boat. Thanks again for your help.
You’re welcome! It will be interesting to know how it all goes as you build it out.
Something in the old build has to be causing this, which you will more than likely find during the new build. If not, if the new build never has the problem, we could just move it back and replace the old build. 🙂
One final thought on the old build, you may need to repair the database.
Access your WordPress database via phpMyAdmin (most hosting providers offer this in their control panel), check all of the tables, and choose “Repair tables” from the pull-down menu.
That probably won’t do anything to improve the TTFB, but at this point, why not? 🙂
OK I have tried the Repair tables without any significant difference.
A quick summary of what I’ve done and issues encountered.
I initially tried to export all the content using the Tools->Export option. This gave an error after a while saying export.php not found – I think this is due to memory issues whilst trying to do the export and so I ended up export each type (Posts, Pages, Custom Posts plus a few others) separately. Not a problem (or so I thought).
Then the import also failed because of a 2mb file upload limit – I tried to amend this by adding code to my .htaccess file but I must have done something wrong as it just wouldn’t take it so I ended up splitting the files into smaller ones and importing that way. All seemed to work ok though.
I then used the Graphene theme (as now), created a child theme and copied across styling options etc. All ok and response time very good (occasional long responses but not many). I also copied over the wp_content/uploads on the file system for all the images.
I had a problem with the categories and taxonomies in that none of them that were exported over retained their hierarchy so I spent quite a bit of time adjusting those manually.
Then I discovered a bit of a show stopper – my media library was empty! Apparantly copying the images on the file system isn’t enough and although there are apparantly plugins to load the media library from the server these do not seem to be ideal as they can lose titles and descriptions etc. I don’t think I can build this. Apparantly it does come across had I selected everything from the initial Export (which I didn’t due to the memory limit issue described above).
Also not sure about getting my menus across and I’ve noticed none of the thumbnails of posts etc are being displayed but this may be due to the missing items in the media library.
I’m on the point of giving up now as I’ve spent so long on this and at the moment can’t see a light at the end of the tunnel!
Yeah, export/import is really the only sane way to move media, so the library maintains its records.
There is https://wordpress.org/plugins/add-from-server/ if you want to do it manually.
If I were in your shoes at this point, I’d just pack up and move to a different hosting provider. It sounds like too much trouble to get it to work in the current environment. If you do choose to do that, don’t bother with import/export, instead treat it like you’re backing up and just restoring on a different host: https://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Backups
Agreed totally. Thank you once again for all your help and advice.
I’m also with Godaddy and have had many problems with the site being slow or failing to load. One support guy told me during a call that I did not want to move it to a WP shared hosting site because it would slow it down even more. I can’t rememember why exactly but just thought that I would share that. Still searching for answers and only wish I had a portion of the knowledge that you all do. 🙂
I was also having slow database response time with my GoDaddy hosting and WordPress. Sometimes my WordPress pages would be quick, but sometimes it would take a half minute or longer for the page just to start rendering.
To figure out the problem, I created a few test pages. The first one was just an HTML page that displayed “Hello World”, which always returned instantaneously. The second was a PHP page that displayed phpinfo(), which also always returned instantaneously. The third one did a simple database query using PHP on the database that was hosting my WordPress site, which just queried “hello” from dual. This page would hang and usually never return. I created a new database on GoDaddy and ran the same page which performed the same query (credentials changed to the new database), and this time it returned the resulting page very quickly. I found that my current WordPress database was on a server running MySQL 5.0, and the new database was running on a different server (according to PHP MyAdmin) running MySQL 5.5. I spent most of the day yesterday setting up a new WordPress site using the new database, and exporting all of the data from my old site into the new one. So far, all of my WordPress pages seem to be responding very quickly, and I haven’t had any of those 30+ second hangups when requesting a page. Most pages seem to load in between 2 and 6 seconds, even the ones that have heavy graphics and screenshots. I think GoDaddy periodically adds better database servers, but if you have to manually migrate your site or else you can be stuck on a old server with poor performance.
