Slow loading WordPress site because of pingback

Question

I have a site running on WordPress that has a very high loading time. When I check tools.pingdom.com this is the result:

I've updated all plugins and WordPress, blocked xmlrpc.php and still the site is loading very slow. I don't know why this is.

Answer 1

A slow loading site, whether Wordpress or some other CMS, can be due to (a combination of) hundreds of reasons. Your question not only lacks a true question, but it is also very brief and thin in details.

Some tips to speed up Wordpress sites:

1. The WordFence Falcon cache on Apache or Nginx is by far the fastest caching plugin in my experience. It allows you to bypass PHP & MySQL entirely for static pages which makes it extremely fast.

2. GoDaddy has a plugin profiler which can tell you very easily which of your plugins are the worst offenders. Try to disable those or find better replacements.

3. Themes can be extremely inefficient. External scripts they load like Facebook like boxes, Twitter feeds etc. can be mighty slow. If you really want those, make them load asynchronously if you can.

4. Many servers don't enable browser caching. Static files like js, css and images can be cached by the browser so upon reload, they are fetched locally, which speeds things up a lot.

For us to give a more meaningful answer, you should probably include the detailed reports of WebPageTest.org, Google Page Speed Insights or GTMetrics.com

Running a couple of tests:

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.arn.nl%2F&tab=desktop

Indeed browser caching is not used.

http://www.arn.nl/…/wp-content/themes/arn/css/normalize.css (expiration not specified)

Your images are badly optimised:

Losslessly compressing http://www.arn.nl/…wp-content/themes/arn/images/default.jpg could save 22.9KiB (51% reduction)

You should/could minimize JS and CSS:

Minifying http://www.arn.nl/wp/wp-content/themes/arn/js/jquery.js could save 35KiB (49% reduction) after compression.

Your webserver is extremely slow to respond to a request, so a better hosting environment, MySQL tweaks like query caching, investigating the slow query log, and the aforementioned Falcon full page caching should be considered.

In our test, your server responded in 5.8 seconds.

The WebPageTest report confirms all of this:

http://www.webpagetest.org/result/151111_34_E9N/

Your server takes 10 seconds before it even starts to respond:

http://www.webpagetest.org/result/151111_34_E9N/1/details/

For a lightweight page like your sub-1MB homepage, that is extreme.

You can still shave off a lot of download size by running your images through a compression tool like Mac OS ImageOptim:

http://www.webpagetest.org/result/151111_34_E9N/1/performance_optimization/#compress_images

And all of these should be cached by the client's browser:

http://www.webpagetest.org/result/151111_34_E9N/1/performance_optimization/#cache_static_content

Whoever designed the site, missed some obvious tricks of the trade. Whoever is responsible for hosting the site has his or her work cut out too.