Moderator
t-p
(@t-p)
Slowness/high CPU usage could be due to (but not limited to):
– A poor or memory intensive theme. Switch to the WordPress default theme and test loading time and see if you see a difference. If you do, may be your theme can be re-written to be more efficient.
– Poor or memory intensive plugins. One by one disable plugins and test loading time and see if you see a difference. If you do, may be that plugin can be re-written to be more efficient.
– your server is slow (e.g., “process hang”, overload, you get a lot of visitors, other problems, etc.); generally, every inexpensive host out there is slow.
– You mentioned using free CloudFlare. Try deactivating it and seeing if it helps. Also sometimes a good purge of the cache on CloudFlare can help.
– Lots of images can cause slowness. Also images loaded without compression.
– Lots of external content (facebook/ gravatar/ google adds, etc.) and redirects in general tends to slow sites down.
Use plugins to optmize/speed up sites:
– Autoptimize, WP Super Cache , etc
– Use Jetpack’s Photon option to speed up image delivery ; Also see this tutorial: http://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/speed-wordpress-save-images-optimized-web/
ueful codex:
http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Optimization
