My Website Is Lagging. Is It My Host Or My WordPress Install?

A website should just work, right? Right. Except it’s never that simple. Sometimes your WordPress website is noticeably slow. You may notice lagging in the dashboard. Is it your wifi? Is it your hosting? Is the lagging because of plugins? Is it the WordPress install itself? And, who do you even ask?

Right. This is why a website doesn’t just work by magic. It’s a combination of technologies (tech stack) working as quickly as possible to serve up information.

How Do You Know if Your Website is Lagging?

One of the ways to know if your website is lagging is the experience you have in the backend. Meaning, once you log into WordPress and you’re in the dashboard, do you find that it’s slow (or slower) to publish a blog post? Does it take a long time to run updates? When you click on the media library to look for a photo to add, does the experience feel frustrating? Hint: it’s not WordPress.

Now, this could be happening because you’re tethered to your iPhone 13 Pro writing this article. Wait, that’s just me. But seriously, it could be a WiFi issue (of course). One way to test is to run a test on your WiFi, maybe kick your kids off of YouTube and try again.

If it still lags, even in performant WiFi, you have a problem. 

Now, your website could be lagging because you’re with cheap WordPress hosting. To that, we ask, why? Why do you hate yourself? Jk jk. But seriously, though. You get what you pay for in hosting and what you really need is great customer service. 

Another reason why your website is lagging is the WordPress install. (Wait. What?)

What is a WordPress Install?

A WordPress install (or instance) is a clean installation on a local or cloud server of the open-source software called WordPress. Note the phrase, clean installation. Sometimes this is referred to as WordPress Core because additional software can be installed to enhance the usability of the website. This additional software plugs and plays like a Nintendo cartridge so we refer to those as plugins.

Fortunately, when you use a great host, much of the heavy lifting is done for you when you opt for managed WordPress hosting. If you’re on a plan that includes one install, that’s for one website. The Rocket Pro plan for example allows 3 installs and includes three websites. Depending upon your host, those installs may be counted toward your plan only if they’re live (as opposed to staging).

“If you are using a hosting provider, you may already have a WordPress database set up for you, or there may be an automated setup solution to do so.”

WordPress.org

Can Too Many Plugins Affect Your WordPress Install?

Yes, installing and deleting plugins or themes can really mess up your WordPress install. This is kind of why we harp on “too many plugins” in the hosting industry; every time you install and activate a plugin, it installs its own tables. Deactivating and deleting those plugins doesn’t necessarily remove the tables in your database – the WordPress install.

It’s like building onto your house, then changing your mind, building another feature, changing your mind. All you end up with are halls that lead to stairs that go nowhere. (Have you been to the Winchester Mystery House yet?) It’s frustrating for a user because they wasted time going down that hall and now they have to backtrack. That’s what happens with your website performance when it wastes time going through empty tables, too.

Tired of a Lagging Website and Ready for a Change? Let’s chat!

There’s nothing more frustrating than a slow website. It causes business owners to stop publishing, editing their sites, and improving their own SEO in utter frustration. The solution starts with fast managed WordPress hosting.

Let us setup a FREE test migration for you so you can see the difference yourself on a temporary URL, without updating any domain settings! It’s time to change your WordPress hosting company right now and experience the difference the Rocket.net Platform means to your business.

BTW – Remember This Episode?

As part of the hosting episode on The Admin Bar, Ben and Patrick had a great conversation about this topic.

Patrick Gallagher  (00:23:19):

Okay? And so the key distinction there, and, and I’m sure Ben can attest to this, is the vast majority of the tickets that you submit to us, it’s not us. It’s not the hardware, it’s not the software, it’s not our stack. It’s not something that we’re doing wrong. It’s your code base, okay?

Patrick Gallagher  (00:23:37):

Like conservatively, 90, 95% of the problems that we see submitted, it’s, you’re running BuddyBoss and LearnDash and [intelligible] and five other things on too small of a server, and you’ve got a custom plugin in there and a whole bunch of, you know, database corruption, all kinds of just. And it’s like, Hey, everything’s on fire. Fix it. You know?

Patrick Gallagher  (00:23:56):

And it’s like, if you are not actually enrolled in the fact that your host is there to help you, then it won’t matter what Ben’s team says. Because you’ll go, well, no, that’s not it. It’s something, it’s something else. You know? And, and, and the distrust that exists in the, in our ecosystem, it’s very real. And it’s, and it’s, and it’s justified. You know, because a lot of people have been told by their host, basically the solution to every single problem is upgrade.

Ben Gabler (00:24:22):

Money.

Patrick Gallagher  (00:24:23):

Just go, yeah, go to the next plan. You know, like if you’re hosted a WPEngine and stuff’s not working, right, it’s, it magically gets solved if you just give them another $400 a month, you know? And so there’s this disconnect and this distrust.

Ben Gabler (00:24:35):

So $4000, 4,000

Patrick Gallagher  (00:24:36):

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And so, and so, again, like you, you wanna find a partner, you know, as Ben said, where, when, when GridPane tells you that you need a bigger box, we literally have no financial incentives to tell you that. You know, like we, it’s, you have, you own that relationship direct with DigitalOcean, or you own that relationship direct with OVH. So why the hell would I tell you to get a bigger box at OVH?

Patrick Gallagher  (00:24:58):

It’s because I can point to the logs and say, look, <laugh>, you’re running, you’ve got resource exhaustion. Exactly. You’re running outta resources. Like you need more horsepower, you know? And so when you’re a GoDaddy, they won’t tell you that because they don’t want you to actually see the code. Cause Yeah. Or, or, right. Like, they’re, they’re not, they’re not a DevOps person. They’re not a systems engineer.

 Kyle Van Deusen (00:25:17):

So I don’t think that’s. I don’t think that’s too unrelatable for us when, what we deal with with clients, right? Because our, our clients come to us and say, Hey, none of this is working. And it’s like, well, ’cause you went in and screwed up all these things, right? 90% of my tickets are also user error as well. So I try to keep that in mind when I hit up, uh, support, you know?

Ben Gabler (00:25:37):

Well, and the other thing that I think people, you know, the best thing about WordPress, let me rephrase it so I don’t upset anybody. One of the best things about WordPress is the millions of plugins out there in the world. One of the worst things about WordPress is the millions of plugins out there in the world. So like, we had a ticket this morning, like, somebody’s like, oh, my site, you know, uh, when I’m trying to save posts randomly, I’ll get like a 502, whatever.

Ben Gabler (00:26:00):

They have a 130 plugins installed, right? Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, I’m like, you’re on a server with 32 Core, 120 gigs Ram an n VM E store that’s attached. We’re not throttling you. The server’s running at 5%. Was there, there is, it is not a hardware problem. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, it is a, a problem with your specific install WordPress. And by the way, if you were on HostGator or GoDaddy or anything, you’d be suspended, right? Yeah. And your site would just not work, period. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>.

Ben Gabler (00:26:28):

So, you know, then you get, you know, somebody installed a plugin the other day and literally made, I, I wanna say a hundred copies of their tables with different prefixes into like a 20 gig database. Uh, and it like ended up corrupting some of the tables on there. And we’re just like, we can help you, but it’s, we’re restoring a backup and fixing, you know, getting rid of your corrupt tables. Like your plugin literally just like smoked your website. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, And they’re like, oh, interesting.

Ben Gabler (00:26:56):

But it’s like those things like Patrick, like hit the nail on the head, like, we are here to help you with that solution and give you that feedback and point to exactly what it was, and at least have the understanding of how to resolve it. And it may not be pretty, but you know, at least we can resolve it. Like, you’re not completely hosed, but this iteration of your site is. But yeah, I mean, I would say the culprit is 90% of the time, like actual way people use WordPress.