Quick question: how's the performance of the blog these days? Normal? A little sluggish? Lightning fast? Infuriatingly slow?
Just curious. I'm just wondering how my hosting company is doing lately.
UPDATE: OK, thanks. The reason I asked, obviously, is that performance lately has been abysmal and I was hoping against hope that it was just me. But it's not.
I use Bluehost, and for the first couple of years it was fine. Then it started to deteriorate and a few months ago it just imploded. Occasionally it's fine, but usually it's molasses slow and it constantly loses connection to the server or throws up a 5xx error. A bit of googling suggests that everyone hates Bluehost these days because their performance has become so bad.
So I suppose I should switch hosting services, even though the thought fills me with dread. In theory it's easy: make a backup, restore to the new server, wait for the new DNS to propagate, and you're done. In reality, I know there's no chance of things going so smoothly. Plug-ins? Comments? Stored images? RSS feed? Etc. etc.
But I'll have to bite the bullet eventually. Anyone have recommendations for a reliable WordPress hosting service?
It has faltered a few times, but is generally ok. I suppose I’m used to Political Wire, which lately often seems like I’m accessing it through dial-up ( I have 1 Gig fiber). I just figure it’s an interesting election year, and traditional news sites have little to offer.
A weird issue started in the last couple weeks: the rss feed is delayed by like 12 hours.
ditto
My RSS reader does not receive your posts as you make them. Instead, I get them all in a batch at the end of the day. For example, today, 8/17/24, I got all the posts with today’s date at ~8:00pm.
Used to work fine.
Same here.
It's pretty bad most of time, it is so bad, even X is better.
Same as many others: painfully slow to load (this seems newish), then mostly ok.
Speedtest tells me my download speed right now is 188Mbps (iPhone over WiFi).
Very slow to load recently. There may be some sort of traffic or performance issues hitting your server or Bluehost. See if you can have them check the logs or move you to another server. Something's not well.
I'm surprised by all of the people saying how slowly the site loads. I visit at least 2 or 3 times a day mostly in Firefox on Windows but also on an Android phone with either Xfinity ~500 mbps plan or T-mobile and don't remember even a single instance when the site didn't load immediately.
Same for me. I have a lot more problems with the WaPo and some other sites than I have ever had here
— really slow, constantly refreshing, unless I check in the middle of the night.
Confirmation rather than news-- long waits before the main page loads, with occasional timeouts; comments pages also pop on screen only after long waits; sometimes after writing and submitting a comment it'll display but the edit button won't show up under it for half a minute or so (the time is a guess). I've sometimes gotten the unavailable host error, but more usually it's just been slow. OTOH typing in the comment box has been mostly normal.
It's been like this with both a medium-sized regional provider in PA, and in eastern Ontario with one of the two big nationwide ISPs. Almost all roads really do seem to lead to the host, alas.
ditto for me
I'm a web designer and have gone through a LOT of hosting companies. Now I use Cloudways, which is terrific. I pay about $22/month and it's well worth it -- fast, secure, never any problems.
A. I wish I hadn't learned about the delayed RSS that is going to bug me.
B. I did a quick web search and found this site which seems to have some good advice on troubleshooting WordPress speed issues: https://kinsta.com/blog/wordpress-slow/
Before doing a server migration I would make sure that the host performance is the real issue. Even if the host performance is the issue there may be some tweaks you can do that will help such as using a CDN and also make it easier to do the migration if you need to later. Note I am not a wordpress user specifically but have worked on optimizing a lot of web services over the years.
It's great that you can put out a request like this (about blog performance) and quickly get all these thoughtful, intelligent replies. When I build a site, "testing" involves me viewing it on a bunch of different devices while hounding two or three friends to please look at it and let me know if it's working. Best I can do, and not very effective.
Bluehost used to be highly recommended, but apparently not so much these days.
Ionos has reasonable rates for hosting (including WordPress sites), and one or two good reviews online. So I picked them a couple of weeks ago when I decided to relaunch my small business site (formerly hosted on Microsoft's Azure hosting thing). Domain name transfer took over a week to get the auth code from web.com (which really sucks since they consumed my previous registrar, dotster, a year or so ago). Then another full week for Ionos to complete the transfer and new registration with them (typical for domain name transfers). I'm using the Windows Web Hosting package which is, frankly, very inexpensive. But their user interface (called Control Panel) is terrible. It's all upsell on every single page--add this, increase to this level, buy more of our stuff--that the domain and hosting management functions are difficult to find at best. And the user experience is ... if a student submitted their web site as a project s/he/it would fail the course; and rightly so. So anyway, I got everything working but do not recommend Ionos unless you like spending hours just trying to figure out how it works.
A week or so back I started noticing your site took a pretty long time to load up. Even now, when I logged in, that took 6-8 seconds to complete.
You might open up a second site, a copy of this one with a different web address, host it on another server and use the second site to debug. I've used StartLogic, with minimal hassle. But I don't host much traffic. You can invite a certain number of people to test out the new site. Then, when you're satisfied everything is mostly working, either re-direct this traffic to the new site, or replace the new site address with the old site. It takes some time, but strikes me there would be less hassle finding things are broken on your main site.
Kevin, I have noticed your site running slow sometimes. In fact, I ran into cases a couple times when clicking on older posts that were really slow, like 30 seconds to come up. I assumed there was maintenance going on. I checked just now, and I don’t see any speed problems even for older posts.
I currently have two WordPress websites on Bluehost, and they are working fine and fast and I’ve never had trouble with speed.
I did have one problem recently with a load of malware getting on to the sites. This took the WordPress sites down for a while until I had the all malware removed. I added Wordfence to block new malware from getting in. But I don't blame Bluehost for any of this. Perhaps my website software developers should have advised me to include better malware protection.
If you tell Bluehost you have a speed problem, and you are wondering if it could be malware related, they can run a scan for malware on all your WordPress files. I had them do this a couple of times about a month ago when I had the malware problems. They did it for free. May be worth a try to check malware off your list.
Not certain this is relevant but was not logged in (referred from Twitter) and went to read this post. Got a message that said something like “it couldn’t connect to a database.”
Tried and it worked fine, so here I am.