Severe site performance issues

  • adenby

    (@adenby)


    1 week, 5 days ago

    For the past week, my site has been extremely slow, and I have been unable to determine the cause. I can temporarily fix it by restarting php, but this often doesn’t last long. I’ve put it into maintenance mode and turned off all but the most necessary plugins, and this doesn’t appear to have helped. Here’s our setup:

    PHP 8.1

    Default Mag theme

    Installed Plugins:

    Advanced Ads

    Advanced Ads Pro

    Advanced Custom Fields

    CAPTCHA 4WP

    Complianz | GDPR/CCPA Cookie Consent

    Default featured image

    FileBird Lite

    Leaky Paywall

    Leaky Paywall – Article Countdown Nag

    Leaky Paywall – Login Redirect

    Leaky Paywall – Recurring Payments

    Leaky Paywall – Registration Redirect

    MailerLite – Signup forms (official)

    Maintenance Mode

    Max Mega Menu

    Max Mega Menu – Pro Addon

    PDFjs Viewer – Embed PDFs

    Really Simple Security

    Simple Adblock Notice

    WP Mail SMTP

    Simple Adblock Notice

    WP Mail SMTP

    WP Post Expires

    WPForms

    WPForms Form Locker

    WPForms Form Pages

    WPForms Surveys and Polls

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

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
  • Moderator t-p

    (@t-p)

    1 week, 5 days ago

    WordPress documentation has some general recommendations for you at https://developer.wordpress.org/advanced-administration/performance/optimization/

    And you can find some specific recommendations by speed testing site at https://gtmetrix.com/ and Use a page speed analysis tool like Page Speed Insights and follow its recommendations as best you can. 

    Also, if site has lots of images, try reviewing https://kinsta.com/blog/optimize-images-for-web/

    Thread Starter adenby

    (@adenby)

    1 week, 5 days ago

    One thing I noticed is several requests from the plugin Location Weather, except I deactivated and uninstalled it.

    franrival

    (@franrival)

    1 week, 5 days ago

    Hi, adenby,

    What you’re describing (a temporary fix after restarting PHP + the slowness returning) clearly points to resource exhaustion or a problem with the processes, not just a conflict between plugins.

    Based on your setup, here’s how I would approach it step by step:

    1. Most likely cause: PHP-FPM / resource saturation

    If restarting PHP temporarily fixes it, that usually means:
    • PHP workers are getting stuck or are overloaded
    • There may be:
    • Long-running queries
    • Delays in external APIs
    • Memory leaks
    • Too many concurrent requests

    Or it could be an issue with a plugin you’ve recently installed. You’ll need to go through them one by one and deactivate them to see if that works.

    Note: For every plugin you deactivate, you’ll need to clear the cache. You can easily do this using LiteSpeedCache.

    pavanmackie

    (@pavanmackie)

    5 days, 20 hours ago

    As @franrival mentioned, the fact that restarting PHP temporarily improves the issue may point to a resource limit being reached. In some cases, this can also be related to a plugin or theme conflict.


    A few things came to mind

    • Have you already cleared all caches after removing the weather plugin, including WP Rocket’s cache?

    • Do you have access to your hosting control panel? If so, it may help to check whether CPU or memory usage increases around the time the site becomes slow.

    Low PHP memory limits can also contribute to this kind of behavior. If your hosting account allows it, you could try increasing the WordPress memory limit by adding the following line to wp-config.php: define( ‘WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ‘256M’ );

    A few other troubleshooting steps you could try:

    1. Install the Query Monitor plugin to check whether a specific plugin, theme, or database query is using an unusual amount of resources.
    2. Ask your hosting provider whether they can review server resource usage or provide slow query logs, which may help identify what is causing the slowdown.
    3. If you have not already done so, test with all plugins disabled except the essential ones, then re-enable them one by one to see whether the issue returns.

    Since the issue improves after a PHP restart, your hosting provider may also be able to check whether there are server-level limits or errors being triggered. I hope that helps narrow it down.

    Thread Starter adenby

    (@adenby)

    5 days, 9 hours ago

    I made sure to clear out caches via WP rocket. And I do have access to the back end. When the issue arises, CPU and Memory usage for the site isn’t generally too high and other sites that are functioning normally appear higher on the Process Manager list in WHM.

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

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