Wordpress Extremely Slow?

[KevinMcC]

The wordpress section of one of my sites is loading extremely slow. At first I was getting the "Error establishing a database connection" come up, but now it just loads real slow.

I called GoDaddy and the guy said the hosting looked fine. Anybody have an idea what's wrong or how to fix it?

http://www.thesportsgeek.com/news/

[Matt Geer]

Tried it twice and loaded fast for me.

FWIW, I had a similar issue with my site taking a while to load as well. I never got an error message, but there would be times where it takes 30 seconds or more to load with no apparent reason why. It always has worked itself out though.

[KevinMcC]

Yeah seems like its back to normal, weird. Thanks for checking Matt

[MJ]

I'm battling this on dozens of sites, frustrating as hell.

[Trikkur]

I've never tried them, but I know there are a few "super-cache" style plugins for Wordpress that will allow for faster load times by caching sections of your database for visitors. Maybe someone can chime in with more details if they know any.

[MJ]

Yea I started a thread about that.

Thing is with me I use wordpress in a static fashion, just pages. I find that on the large volume of sites I post if I start using various plugins it's a chore to keep all of them updated since the updates are fairly frequent. If I don't update them, it tends to lead to problems.

I never had a problem until 2.8.4 fwiw.

[Michael Martinez]

Plug-ins, adsense, and any other tool that accesses a third-party server can cause slow page "load" times.

[MJ]

I'm aware of that, but in my case I'm not using any plugins. Simple default theme installs.

I had the server support guys replace a node and it seemed to help a little, but I'm not sure overall.

[Michael Martinez]

But you DO have a plug-in: Google Analytics. They often cause Web pages to hang.

[Graham]

If you have access check your HTTP error logs. There might be some code in there for something like an image that does not exist or something like that slowing it down. Other than that it could just be your DB server. If you are on a shared host and the DB is getting hit with a bunch of requests from various sites, your site is gonna suffer too. Also, like Michael mentioned analytics and any other customer tracking tools will definitely slow things down.

You can also try something like this to run a test if there is anything way out of wack:
http://tools.pingdom.com/?url=http:/...pe=0&save=true

Or here:

http://www.webpagetest.org/test