Hiya - I have a problem with a couple of websites. They are both running CMS Made Simple, and are both on the same hosting. They have a lot of modules installed on each (members log in, forum, news, blog, etc) so I know that slows things down a bit.

 

But they are both ridiculously slow (as in take 10-20 secs to load), which I'm concerned about. I'm not very knowledgable in databases and php but I know it can be the hosting that effects it, and the caching, etc, but not sure why exactly....

 

So I guess my questions are..

 

a. Why is it much slower than my other CMSMS sites?

b. Will changing / upgrading the hosting help, and what should I be looking for?

c. How can I speed things up a bit?

It could be your server or the coding that is making the sites run slow.

 

Were the sites slow before or is it the modules that are slowing it down?

Have you tried disabling different plugins to see if it speeds up when a certain one is disabled?

Does your server have PHPMyAdmin? You could try optimising the tables through there.

When you set the site up did you use 'localhost' or an external address for the DB?

Will try answer your questions as much as I can, I really haven't a clue with databases, I know how to create one and export it and that's about it!

 

They have always been slow but then I set it up on my server first and transferred it to their server when it was ready...

No I haven't tried - I can't really because its a busy site with people signing up and signing in all the time.

It has phpmyadmin yes - not sure how to do optomising though!

I THINK I used an external address but I can't remember it was ages ago.

 

It's weird cos I have about 6 CMSMS sites... ones set up on my server run quickly... but I have 2 people on the same hosting as me, one of the sites runs quickly, and one is really slow. And then there are these 2 which are on different hosting, both of which run really slowly. T'is driving me mad.

Here's a link to optimising your database in PHPMyAdmin.

Ta very much, will see if that helps

There's another problem with CMSs and plugins - the chances are, it's loading several separate script files and several separate stylesheets. The more separate files have to be loaded by the browser, the more time overhead.

 

You can check if this is the case by using Firefox, installing the Web Developer plugin, loading one of your CMS pages and selecting "Information > Document Size" from the Web Developer toolbar.

 

If you have more than 1 stylesheet and more than maybe 2 or 3 scripts listed, it's probably time to look at whether you can merge them. Depending on the plugins you're running, that might be easy or hard, but it's worth talking to people on the CMSms forums.

 

This option is also a useful way of seeing which elements of your page are the biggest - you can expand the list of images loaded by the page and look for any which are really big, etc etc.

Cheers Zig - I'll do that now. What I did was take the stylesheets and upload them separately from the database to try and speed things up a bit.... hasn't made a whole lot of difference...

 

I can only presume it's the modules that are slowing it down, or maybe having more than 1-2 templates?

Okay here's the Index page...

 

Document (1 file) - 13kb

Images (4 files)

Object (0 files)

Scripts (1 files) - 5kb

Style Sheets (8 files) - 24kb

= 48kb

 

Didn't realise there were so many stylesheets! Will try and compress that a bit!

 

EDIT: I should add that it's not just the site its the back-end admin bit that takes ages to load as well, which doesn't take that long on other sites... which makes me wonder if it's the server??

It could be, i don't know about your cms system, but are there any caching plugins available? It could be the server, other software such as magento, and large wordpress installations can be resource heavy. But i should imagine it really only affects larger installations, if it's a relatively small site, i don't think there should be too much of a problem unless your host is capping you ridiculously low.

 

You should gzip as much as you can, and try to reduce http requests (reduce the number of different files) as each request can cause lag, which adds up.

 

Make sure all js is at the bottom (gives the appearance of faster loading), and css at the top.

try to reduce http requests

Yeah, that's the proper way of saying what I was saying