Can anybody help explain whats causing my site to load so badly?

Question

I have just launched the website - exactabacussoftware.com built with a custom theme in wordpress.

I noticed that the page load time was stupidly slow and when I checked the results with pingdom I could see that a lot of the analysis was duplicated and I'm not sure why this is or even if it is whats causing the site to load so slowly.

I haven't yet integrated a cache plugin which I intend to do but regardless of this I cannot see why this page loads for around 24 secs.

The entire site loads properly except for the blog page - http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/cEmMjD/http://www.exactabacussoftware.com/blog

Server Spec: Windows server 2008R2 IIS version 7.5 PHP version 5.3.19

Anyone got any ideas as to why this page is loading so slow?

here is the test sites result aswell for comparison - http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/bw4JTo/wp-eas.exact3ex.co.uk

The only code changes have been the rewrites to the URL's

Over to you guys...

Answer 1

I think the issue is with a custom theme. Try doing this steps:

1. Remove all active widgets
2. Uninstall all plugins
3. Check loading time - if not improved it's an issue with custom theme.

One more thing to do (to check if it's not the host issues) - activate default wordpress theme and check average loading speed, if speed is not improved try to configure your server correctly or change hosting plan or hosting provider.

Answer 2

Wait 21.07s (The web browser is waiting for data from the server).

The most common reason for this in the case of Apache is the usage of DNS Reversal Lookup. What this means is that the server tries to figure out what the name of your machine is, each time you make a request. This can take several seconds, and that explains why you have a long WAIT time and then a very quick load, because the matter is not about bandwidth.

The obvious solution for this is to disable hostnamelookup in /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf

HostnameLookups Off