High Latency 4-6s on WordPress sites

Question

I have a few sites which are exhibiting a slow load time. All are WordPress 3.5. All are hosted through BlueHost. All are developed by me (built as child-themes of existing WP themes).

Using Safari Developer tools, I see that they average 4–6 seconds (not ms) of latency before anything happens, which appears to be abnormally high. I've tried to wrap my head around latency, and I know I'm not the only one to ask about it here ... but I cannot figure out if the primary culprit is my hosting provider (Bluehost) or with my development.

Here are a couple of my sites with issues:

http://www.HubbardProductions.com

http://www.xla.com

Can anyone point me in the right direction? What can I do to reduce the latency?

Answer 1

you can see from here. your website is responding lately. http://i.imgur.com/VIVoq.png

http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/jyKI0Kv01/http://hubbardproductions.com/

Answer 2

Chris, same problem here. Also with Bluehost + Wordpress 3.5.

Some minutes ago, my sites even went down, and I was unable even to access cPanel. I received the following error:

Auth failed69.89.31.120:2083 is temporarily down.

I contacted the technical staff and they told me to try again, deleting cookies, and also sent me this url:

https://my.bluehost.com/cgi/help/481

Which, in my case, is of little help, but perhaps it can help you.

I asked them if there was any problem with the servers lately and they said nope, no issues.

So, to answer your question, I would:

1. Wait a few days, in case it is temporary (I hope).
2. If not, I would run some tests with simple html pages, then php, then php + simple SQL, etc., to find the bottleneck, and if it is a server issue or a wordpress issue.
3. If I find it is a server issue, I would complain.
4. If everything fails, I would move my sites to other hosting. Bye-bye Bluehost. :(

Good luck!