WordPress Frustrations

The past number of days have been extremely frustrating for me with regards to this site. The loading speed of the overall public site as well as the admin page has come to an excruciating crawl. While it has gotten better (slightly), I’m still not even close to getting it to where I want it and where it needs to be. I thought that I’d share what I’ve been dealing with both for your benefit, (if you have a WordPress blog) and to hopefully get some helpful tips from some of my terrific readers.

I first noticed that something wasn’t quite right somewhere about a week ago. I would load the page after making small changes here and there and I started to notice that it was taking a lot longer to actually come up. I then reversed my recent changes but even that didn’t seem to help. No matter what I did, it just seemed to get worse and worse.

Next, I upgraded my PHP on GoDaddy from 4.x to 5.x. That did seem to do the trick, for a few minutes. I had read that there were some incompatibilities with either WP and PHP 4.x or WP 2.7 and PHP 4.x. Either way I figured it needed to be done. Then I upgraded my 2.7 installation to 2.7.1 via the GoDaddy control panel. BIG MISTAKE! For some reason the install failed and it just made the site flaky as hell. So, back to 2.7!

After all of this I decided to see if it was maybe some of my plug-ins. I’m not running very many of them, maybe 8-10 of them. And they’re pretty typical plug-ins at that: Akismet, All in One SEO, Feedburner Feedsmith, etc. I really didn’t think this would have too much to do with it since the admin panel was just as slow as the public site. I deactivated ALL of them and tested the site. Hmmm, there was a noticeable increase in speed. Maybe we have something here. I started re-activating them and then testing the site after each one. Crazily enough, when I activated PHP Speedy and WP Super Cache it slowed down again! How is it that when activating plugins that are supposed to speed up a site actually slow it down?! With both of those disabled and the rest of my plugins back on the site was better but by no means as fast as it used to be.

UPDATE:

Needless to say by this point I’m getting downright pissed. After even more searching around I figured that it was finally time to downgrade my WP install to the latest version that actually worked with my site, 2.6.5. Today over my lunch break I FTP’d into my site and pulled down my entire WP folder just to make sure I had it in case I needed to put back up. A quick download of 2.6.5 from the WP support site and then an equally as quick upload to my site and I’m thrilled to report that it looks like I’m back in business!!

I have been running tests for a while now and the downgrade seems to have completely fixed it. Unbelievable. After all I’ve been dealing with and it was something so simple I was able to take care of it over a lunch break. I still haven’t completely ruled out switch themes but I really love the control I have with this one (Atahualpa 3.3.2) and unless I could find one that was equally as customizable via the admin console, I think I’ll stick this one out for a while. I think what frustrates me the most is the absolute denial by WordPress that their latest incarnation is not causing these issues. Looking on their support forums I found hardly any help from WP. One moderator in particular, I won’t mention his name, was completely worthless and seemed to have the standard answer to change hosts and/or not to use WordPress! NOT HELPFUL!

I guess we learn from every experience that comes our way and this was no exception. I’ve learned more about PHP, plug-ins, WP in general, HTTP requests, etc. than I thought I’d ever know. This will only make me stronger. <evil cackle>

I’d like to know if any of you have had the same issues that I encountered and how you (hopefully) overcame them. I’d love your insight.

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