Website Managers

During the past few weeks my blog and other sites had been painfully slow. The page loading time was in excess of 15 seconds. When in the WordPress dashboard, I would click a button to update a setting and go do something else for 2 minutes while the page loaded.

As a marketer, we are told that we have 7 seconds to grab the attention of visitors. If the page takes longer than that to load, there is a good chance they will go someplace else.

The slow loading became so frustrating that I called our web host, Pagematic. Since some of the sites I run are on a Virtual Private Server (VPS), things that others do on that server can affect the performance of my websites. For instance, if someone ran intensive or poorly written scripts on their VPS, the entire srever can slow down. In this instance, Pagematic located the sites that were running scripts which are not allowed on the server and shut them down.

That was good, but we found the items that made a noticeable affect on the page load time and restored it to a much more acceptable level were:

* Installed WP Super Cache
* Deactivated WP VideoTube, WP CB Revenue
* Deactivated Advertising Manager

WP VideoTube posts YouTube videos automatically based on keywords you setup. This can slow your site down because the plugin takes keywords you enter and the ones that match are checked against videos on YouTube. That takes time, adding to your load time.

WP CB Revenue automatically displays Clickbank products related to your post keywords at the end of each post! You can define the title of the section to something like, “Related Posts”. This may be a good way to make money with ClickBank, but increases your page load time more than WP VideoTube does.

Advertising Manager allows you to control and arrange your advertising and referral blocks on your Wordpress blog. With Widget and inline post support, integration with all major ad networks. This plugin added 2.5 seconds to the load time and I saw no difference in the page content when deactivating it.

I learned about all of this from the technical support at Pagematic, where all my websites are hosted. The first person that answered the call checked into it with me on the phone and analyzed the access time using an online service. When that did not tell me why there was such a delay in loading these pages, the person I normally deal with at Pagematic called me.

Together we went through the site and he asked me what plugins I was using. I read the list to him and he noticed I was not using WP Super Cache. I told him that I tried it previously and had trouble with it. So he offered to install it for me.

Once that was done, he called me back and we went through the plugin list once again. I disabled a list of plugins, all related to Twitter and YouTube. We immediately saw a dramatic descrease in the page load time.

Then I went back through the ones I had just deactivated and reactivated them one at a time until the page load time increased. That told us which ones were adding to the page load time and needed to be deactivated until I either needed them or more likely, an alternative to those plugins that behaved better.

Another thing I learned, which lead to these updates, came from when Pagematic told me that one of my websites was using far too much memory. I immediately thought it would be a daunting task to determine which site was causing the issues, along with which plugins were misbehaving. Fortunately, we found it quickly by going to the site that has the most traffic.

From there I started going through my other websites that have blogs and not only installing WP Super Cache, but checking the other plugins on them too. Pagematic offered to help me with any issues I had. Now that is the type of support I really enjoy!

A few extra dollars more each month, when compared to the previous companies I had used, more than paid for the switch to this hosting company, by having immediate friendly and personal service, knowledgable technical support, plus quick resolution to my issues. That is why all my sites are now hosted here, as yours should be too.

Note: I am now required by law to tell you that the link below is an affiliate link. Since I like the service here so much, I joined as a reseller. Your use of that link is your acknowledgement that I will earn a few dollars for referring you to Pagematic when you choose to use their services.

Tags: blog hosting, technical support, troubleshooting WordPress, web hosting, WordPress hosting, WordPress plugins

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