hosting - Is my host the problem?

I've been working on my WordPress Site for quite some time now, and it's about ready to be deployed. One major issue, though - it's VERY SLOW! At first I thought that the 20 second load time could be attributed to the 100+ images on each page; however, after some analysis, I've come to find that it's taking nearly 10 seconds for the server to get through its initial queries (before any content can even think about being downloaded). I am very new to the hosting game, and I know nothing about it. I've done my fair share of reading and I've come across the idea of moving away from my cheap shared hosting plan to a dedicated host over at VPS. Furthermore, I plan on integrating a CDN to increase the speed of all of the images loading up.

Two questions:

1. Would switching hosts make the page load time go down to around 5 seconds (or less!)
2. What are your thoughts on vps and their hosting options? Do you recommend any other hosts for a optimized wordpress site?

Thank you!

Evan

I've been working on my WordPress Site for quite some time now, and it's about ready to be deployed. One major issue, though - it's VERY SLOW! At first I thought that the 20 second load time could be attributed to the 100+ images on each page; however, after some analysis, I've come to find that it's taking nearly 10 seconds for the server to get through its initial queries (before any content can even think about being downloaded). I am very new to the hosting game, and I know nothing about it. I've done my fair share of reading and I've come across the idea of moving away from my cheap shared hosting plan to a dedicated host over at VPS. Furthermore, I plan on integrating a CDN to increase the speed of all of the images loading up.

Two questions:

1. Would switching hosts make the page load time go down to around 5 seconds (or less!)
2. What are your thoughts on vps and their hosting options? Do you recommend any other hosts for a optimized wordpress site?

Thank you!

Evan

• hosting
• optimization
• cdn

Share Improve this question asked Apr 24, 2012 at 3:42 EvanEvan 2311 gold badge22 silver badges88 bronze badges 5

• 1 Who is your host? – Travis Pflanz Commented Apr 24, 2012 at 3:44
• 1 @Travis ipage is my current host. – Evan Commented Apr 24, 2012 at 3:46
• I have never used ipage. I recently had slow loading times with one of my hosts. I switched to bluehost and haven't had any problems at all with their shared plan. – Travis Pflanz Commented Apr 24, 2012 at 3:49
• Would you say that the way the page is loading could be attributed to my host though? – Evan Commented Apr 24, 2012 at 3:50
• It is absolutely possible. My site was a magazine style site and it had a very large dynamic menu and many different areas with "Latest Posts" from many different categories as well as "Top Authors" and "Top Contributors", all dynamic. My old host told me they were limiting my service because of the number of database queries being used per hour. – Travis Pflanz Commented Apr 24, 2012 at 3:54

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2 Answers 2

Sorted by: Reset to default 2

I addition to the methods you have mentioned, the biggest way to speed up your loading time is with a caching plugin.

There are many in the WordPress Plugin Directory, but my favorite is Quick Cache.

Cache

As an addition to @Travis Pflanz answer: Cachify does it all for you and is that well coded, that you don't even need to have many options. I run it on my own site (extremly bad mediatemple - currenty switching) and I'm highly satisfied.

Minify

What I'm also doing is minifying stuff with WP Minify (can't find the link). Also good is BWP Minify. Summing up your js and css files to single saves requests and therefore execution time as the server doesn't has to get asked.