Hey guys, I'm trying to help a friend with his WordPress site and we cant figure out what is making it run so slow. We submitted a support ticket to godaddy but the said they could not replicate the problem. I also installed the WP- Super Cache plugin with no luck. Do you guys have any other suggestions? The website is http://culinaryjunkies.com/ Thanks ahead of time.
Why not try and look at the statistics of your friend's site. Some runs so slow because they can't handle the number of visitors visiting the site if there's too many. If that is so, then you can decide what to pick next.
First thing I would do is install Firebug in my Firefox, and load the site looking at the Net tab. It will show you what exact processes are hanging. First thing I notice is the gd-start rating plugin is taking almost 2 seconds to load. (everything else is pretty slow too) Next, the styleb.css file seems to hang forever and then comes back with a not found error. Since on 404 errors you seem to be calling wordpress again, you are creating a giant loop that will also slow down the whole system. (loading wordpress with the missing css file -> 404 loading wordpress again with the missing css file -> and so on and so on) So I would try to disable the gd-star plugin and change the way your 404 redirects and maybe use a static 404 error page for now. Last, of course fix the missing css file.
Thank you helpinghost! So we uninstalled the gd-star plugin and also are using the godaddy's Default 404 Error Page which slightly improved the load speed. How do we generate the missing css file?