Fixing a slow site
Do the diagnosis before the shopping. A bigger plan fixes a resource problem and does nothing at all for the other kind.
1. Read the health panel
On your Pressy's overview, under Health:
| What you see | What it means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| vCPU throttling high | Out of vCPU; the site is being paused | Add a vCPU |
| Out of memory above zero | Out of memory; something was killed | Add memory |
| Both quiet | Not a resource problem | Steps 2 onwards |
Adding resources takes about a minute and is pro-rated — changing size.
2. Switch on caching
If you have not already:
- OPcache is on by default and needs nothing.
- Redis object caching is two steps on the PHP → Caching tab: start Redis, then install the object-cache plugin the same screen offers. Full steps.
Redis is worth the most on sites with a lot of pages, products or plugins, because it stops WordPress asking the database the same questions repeatedly.
Add a page-caching plugin on top for anonymous visitors. A shop or membership site should exclude cart, checkout and account pages from it.
3. Find the plugin that is costing you
- Go to PHP → Error log and press Load error log.
A plugin throwing a warning on every request is doing work on every request. Repeated entries are grouped, so the biggest group is usually the answer.
Then measure properly with Query Monitor, installed temporarily: it names the slowest database queries and which plugin ran them.
4. The usual suspects
- Images straight from a phone. A 4 MB photo scaled down in the browser still downloads 4 MB. Resize before uploading, or use an optimisation plugin.
- Related-posts, live-search and visitor-counter plugins. They query the database on every page load.
- Two plugins doing the same job. Two caching plugins, or two SEO plugins, are slower than one.
- A page builder loading its whole library on a page that uses three blocks.
5. Check it is actually your site
Test from somewhere neutral — PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix — rather than from your own browser with a logged-in admin session, which skips most caching and is always slower than what visitors get.
Slow only for you, fast for everyone else, usually means your connection or an admin-only plugin.
When to write to us
Write to us if the health panel is quiet, caching is on, and pages still take several seconds. Send the address of a slow page and a PageSpeed or GTmetrix link, and we will tell you what we can see from our side.
Didn’t solve it?
Write to us with your Pressy’s address and what you were doing when it went wrong. Answered by the people who built it.
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