Server response time - Drupal on Bluehost

Question

In the past, when I checked the site speed in google page speed or many similar tools, the site got very high scores (good css & js optimize). I installed the Advanced CSS/JS Aggregation module and boost module to get high score.

Then, suddenly, I started to get message on the google page speed (and other tools), saying my server response time is slow - around 3 seconds.

My site built with Drupal 7 and hosted on Bluehost Shared hosting.
Bluehost technical support says that the problem is not in their side

What do you think causing the server to be slow?
How can I fix it?
Or at least, what should I check (images, caching, something else)?

Answer 1

The first thing to figure out is what's a desirable response time. For example, if you have lots of modules and pretty heavy site/homepage then maybe 3 seconds is ok unless something is done to change the processing time(caching, using less modules etc).

Back to your case of where should i check: Check, your homepage and what views and other things are loading for your homepage to be rendered. Then make a list and go one by one to ask:

1. Is it optimal/can it be improved? maybe something is throwing the caching out(dynamic parameters be injected by each request for the item etc).

2. If you're using views, enable the sql view to see what sql statements its using and you can use tools to analyze/improve it(this could be a question by itself)

3. Look at the modules that load/being used to make sure you need them.

Check on the drupal caching(/admin/config/development/performance) and make sure the correct checkboxes are checked.

This could as well be blue host's problem because if they're hosting so many sites on the server, the server will start kicking some sites out of memory and load them back as they're requested by the visitors hence the slow load(server requests the site, drupal loads it from database etc).

You can ask specific questions after you check those.