The site is unusably slow on both dashboard and frontend pages.
This is at such a level it can take minutes for a page to load. I have 10 sites on local but am only running one. Until recently it’s loaded in an acceptable amount of time.
All my sites are running slowly, even exceptionally small ones which were built to be speedy.
Do you have all of these sites running at the same time? Even though some are very minimal do you have a site that’s running that’s overly large? Maybe one with a giant media library or bloated DB?
The one I’m testing is large and is the only one running. I’ve been making some changes over the last couple of months, but it’s when I’ve opened it back up today that it’s as slow - and I’ve not changed anything on the site in the interim.
I am currently trying to disable the plugins I can and update the ones that are out of date but its a painful process with the site being so slow!
In fact it does seem to have improved a little with deleting some of the plugins that I can do without but it’s still not amazing. Ill try that plugin for memory usage and see if tat highlights anything.
I would recommend making sure any plugins that are inactive or no longer needed on the site are deactivated and deleted. Not only can this slow the site down, but it poses a security risk when a site is live as malicious content can enter the site through plugins that are inactive.
Always keeping themes and plugins up-to-date ensures security as well as site performance, as updates address any bugs that may have been found in themes and plugins. So all available updates should also be run through.
Plugins are great additions to a site but each one starts to shape the site a bit differently and will require resources to make them function properly. There’s no exact formula to this but when you have a large number of plugins, the site can sail into some rough waters as they fight for resources. Each plugin developer has their own way of coding as well, which can easily cause conflicts with others.
Bringing everything up to date and removing what is no longer needed would help eliminate potential sources of trouble.
There’s no frivolous plugins, just a few that I don’t need for testing a particular modification - this site is highly tuned and maintained. They’re not drastically out of date either, just a month’s worth of upgrades. However, there were a few I had deactivated for the local environment, which I have now deleted and that does seem to have improved things again.