I actually edit the db out of habit now, just to be safe. It's likely that in most instances you are right and it is just the choice of plugins I've been working with.

Well I've sorted the email out, and enabled compression on the server. Using GTMetrix, the rating went from F to B when I enabled the compression.

http://gtmetrix.com/reports/www.microphoto.co.uk/JfI4Rs5Q

Things are still pretty sluggish though. I'm assuming if I were to disable all my plugins, and test the site, that if a plugin were responsible the change should be instant, and not have any form of delay before any difference is noticed?

Which site is it that's slow? I'll take a look and see if there's anything obvious.

Well thinking about it with a fresh brain this morning...

zpyder.co.uk is a joomla site and is fast enough and behaves as you would expect.

Microphoto would take about 5-7 seconds to load a page, both front end and admin, so I assume it's a wordpress issue.

Just deleted all my deactivated plugins, and disabled all the others. Everything ran fast enough I'd say.

Started to reactivate plugins, got bored, reactivated them all, and it's still pretty fast. Can a duff plugin slow a site down even if it's not active?

EDIT
Having said that, it does seem to be slowing down a bit now... Try viewing a few different species on microphoto and the other pages and tell me how fast it is for you?

Well, I think it might have been one of these:
NextGEN Gallery
Regenerate thumbnails
Ultimate CMS
Flickr Embed

Deactivated those and it seems to have sped up again. Thing with them though is that I think I installed those plugins a while back when I was trying to speed things up :|

Maybe the email thing slowed stuff down, so I installed plugins to speed up, not knowing that they weren't helping until I sorted the email problem.

It's not super fast, the slow speed seems to be response time from the server though. The best thing you could do is to install a cache plugin like WP Super Cache or W3 Total Cache, this will dramatically improve site speed as it will load the pages as pure html from cache, which is always good for google rank.

Already have WP Super cache installed

Main thing is it's faster than it was.

It must be the server response time then. It might be worth chasing it up again with the hosts and see if they think it's all running correctly now.

I would have thought that compression would slow the site down further. You're asking the server to compress its http responses on the fly.

Flickr plugin is what I'd point the finger at too, as that sounds like it goes and grabs from an external site before updating. Only takes some dodgy JavaScript ajax call and your site is held up, yeah its meant to be asynchronous but its not if its done badly.

Could also be throttled if using api keys.

Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk 2

Curiosity... Do a tcpping and a tcptraceroute to your site. Just wondering if its the hoster or the path to it or something else.

Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk 2

the pages themselves seem fast to load, its waiting for a response from the server that is taking time, so M3ta7h3ad's idea is pretty good one doing a traceroute to see where its slow.

Quote
Tracing route to microphoto.co.uk [192.254.235.203]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

  1    71 ms    99 ms    99 ms  dsldevice.lan [192.168.1.254]
  2    23 ms    23 ms    22 ms  lo0-central10.pcl-ag03.plus.net [195.166.128.184
]
  3    23 ms    27 ms    22 ms  link-a-central10.pcl-gw01.plus.net [212.159.2.16
8]
  4    23 ms    23 ms    22 ms  200.core.access.plus.net [212.159.0.200]
  5    26 ms    26 ms    25 ms  ae2.pcl-cr02.plus.net [195.166.129.7]
  6    24 ms    23 ms    24 ms  ae1.ptw-cr02.plus.net [195.166.129.2]
  7    23 ms    24 ms    22 ms  10gigabitethernet5-1.core1.lon1.he.net [5.57.80.
128]
  8   104 ms    97 ms   100 ms  10gigabitethernet10-4.core1.nyc4.he.net [72.52.9
2.241]
  9   118 ms   107 ms   149 ms  100gigabitethernet7-2.core1.chi1.he.net [184.105
.223.161]
10   145 ms   136 ms   139 ms  10gigabitethernet4-1.core1.den1.he.net [72.52.92
.234]
11   156 ms   148 ms   157 ms  10gigabitethernet4-2.core1.slc1.he.net [184.105.
222.154]
12   159 ms   158 ms   191 ms  ace-data-centers-inc.10gigabitethernet1-4.core1.
slc1.he.net [66.160.133.118]
13   179 ms   148 ms   148 ms  rtr-b.unifiedlayer.com [199.58.199.118]
14   149 ms   149 ms   152 ms  192.254.235.203

Trace complete.

Quote
Tracing route to www.google.co.uk [173.194.78.94]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

  1    26 ms    99 ms    99 ms  dsldevice.lan [192.168.1.254]
  2    32 ms    22 ms    23 ms  lo0-central10.pcl-ag03.plus.net [195.166.128.184
]
  3    23 ms    23 ms    25 ms  link-b-central10.pcl-gw02.plus.net [212.159.2.17
0]
  4    46 ms    22 ms    22 ms  202.core.access.plus.net [212.159.0.202]
  5    30 ms    22 ms    23 ms  ae1.ptw-cr02.plus.net [195.166.129.2]
  6    39 ms    22 ms    23 ms  72.14.223.32
  7    23 ms    23 ms    23 ms  209.85.252.188
  8    23 ms    24 ms    22 ms  209.85.253.92
  9    53 ms    28 ms    28 ms  72.14.242.166
10    28 ms    36 ms    29 ms  209.85.252.83
11     *        *        *     Request timed out.
12    29 ms    35 ms    29 ms  wg-in-f94.1e100.net [173.194.78.94]

Trace complete.

Quote
Tracing route to www.tekforums.net [217.160.114.99]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

  1    59 ms    99 ms   100 ms  dsldevice.lan [192.168.1.254]
  2    24 ms    24 ms    22 ms  lo0-central10.pcl-ag03.plus.net [195.166.128.184
]
  3    25 ms    25 ms    49 ms  link-a-central10.pcl-gw01.plus.net [212.159.2.16
8]
  4    43 ms    23 ms    70 ms  200.core.access.plus.net [212.159.0.200]
  5    23 ms    25 ms    26 ms  ae1.ptw-cr01.plus.net [195.166.129.0]
  6    23 ms    23 ms    31 ms  linx.bb-c.the.lon.gb.oneandone.net [195.66.224.9
8]
  7    40 ms    36 ms    36 ms  te-1-3.bb-c.bap.rhr.de.oneandone.net [212.227.12
0.49]
  8    46 ms    38 ms    38 ms  ae-4.bb-d.bs.kae.de.oneandone.net [212.227.122.7
]
  9    41 ms    62 ms    38 ms  ae-2.gw-dista-a.bs.kae.de.oneandone.net [212.227
.121.216]
10    38 ms    82 ms    38 ms  vl-999.gw-ps11.bs.kae.de.oneandone.net [212.227.
125.13]
11    38 ms    37 ms    44 ms  kundenserver.de [217.160.114.99]

Trace complete.

Compared to google and tek, the path to your host does seem slower, but not considerably enough to affect the page loading, its probably a combination of factors. I'd definitely talk to your host again.

I've updated the ticket with that info, will see what they have to say. Have to admit that if I needed to move, the quality of spelling etc from the 1&1 rep is a bit lacklustre :/ I guess worst case scenario if I do move, I can always move back.

Won't the traceroute be affected by location? I ran a traceroute from a site that had european and american start points, and the NY based host was more akin to the results you posted for Google and Tek. Where is 1&1 based?

1&1 is european based (Germany I think from the .de) but I believe they now have a UK based datacentre, or at least UK DNS routing as the domains I most recently configured through them specified UK DNS entries.

If you want I'll host a copy of your sites for you temporarily so you can test it and see what you think, although that might give a skewed indication since I'm using their business level package which has more processing power allocated.

QuoteHello,

Here is an updated report on your currently installed applications:

Up-To-Date Applications:
========================================
Wordpress :: 3.6 :: /home2/zpyder/public_html/www.microphoto.co.uk
Wordpress :: 3.6 :: /home2/zpyder/public_html/freshairphotography.co.uk

Vulnerable Applications:
========================================
Drupal :: 6.16 :: /homefffffffffffffffffff
Joomla :: 1.5.23 :: /home2/fffffffffffffffffff
Joomla :: 1.5.23 :: /home2/zfffffffffffffff
Joomla :: 1.5.23 :: /home2/zffffffffffffffffffff
PHPList :: 2.10.13 :: /home2/zpfffffffffffffffffffff

Here is the caching mechanisms for the reported applications:

+++ WordPress caching report +++

/home2/zpyder/public_html/www.microphoto.co.uk
Caching Plugin: WP Super Cache (Active)
Caching Enabled: Yes Recommended
Browser Cache: No Yes
Rewrite Mode: No Yes
PHP Mode: Yes No
Legacy Mode: No No
Cache Users: Yes No
Compression: No Yes
Cache Expiry: 1800 s 3600 s

/home2/zpyder/public_html/freshairphotography.co.uk
No caching enabled.

+++ Joomla caching report +++

/home2/zpyder/public_html
Sessions: Database
Maint mode: No
Compression: No
Caching: No (file)
Cache Time: 15 min
SEF URLs: No SEF Suffix: No
Use Rewrite: No Use CAPTCHA: No

/home2/zpyder/public_html/topmouthgudgeon.co.uk
Sessions: Database
Maint mode: No
Compression: No
Caching: No (file)
Cache Time: 15 min
SEF URLs: No SEF Suffix: No
Use Rewrite: No Use CAPTCHA: No

/home2/zpyder/public_html/test
Sessions: Database
Maint mode: No
Compression: No
Caching: No (file)
Cache Time: 15 min
SEF URLs: No SEF Suffix: No
Use Rewrite: No Use CAPTCHA: No

None of the above applications are correctly caching, this will always impact your initial load times because the server has to execute your PHP code on every page load, caching allows the content that was generated to be loaded statically rather than processing the PHP code on every request. Please review our documentation on how to optimize these applications:

Optimizing WordPress: http://support.hostgator.com/articles/specialized-help/technical/wordpress/optimizing-wordpress
WP Super Cache: http://support.hostgator.com/articles/specialized-help/technical/wordpress/wp-super-cache-plugin
Optimizing Joomla: http://support.hostgator.com/articles/specialized-help/technical/optimizing-joomla

If you continue to experience poor performance, please tell us which domain or URL specifically is being problematic so that we can more finely investigate the cause of the performance hits.

Also, if you wish to remove an application that you installed via Fantastico you can just simply remove the directories and their respective MySQL databases. This can all be done through the cPanel interface. If you require further assistance with this please let us know.

If you have any other questions or concerns please let us know!


Best regards,