What to do if the webpage takes a long time to load?

Reason 1: Incorrectly selected tariff plan

Each tariff plan on our hosting has its own limitations on resources for CPU and RAM, and accordingly the site can work at a minimum tariff plan more slowly than at the maximum. To check what kind of load your site creates, you need to go to the DirectAdmin hosting control panel, go to the resource consumption section and load schedules created by your site will be displayed there.

What to do: change the tariff plan to a higher one - you can do this directly from your personal account, while you don’t pay anything, you just change the end date of the service. You can also ask support for a few days to connect a higher tariff for testing - to determine what memory and processor limit you need.

Reason 2: Unoptimized scripts

But not always the only solution is to change the tariff plan to the largest. As a rule, this is the easiest method if there is no desire to understand the script itself.

But there is an opportunity to reduce resource consumption by scripts and thereby save money when choosing a tariff plan.

As a rule, the main load is created by requests from the php script to the mysql database, and the more these requests are made with one call to the script, the slower it will be processed. One query to the database is processed very quickly - it is fractions of milliseconds, but what if you have an online store that does a search on the database with a choice of certain values, and the database contains a large number of records.

What to do: by enabling caching, you can significantly speed up the loading of your site for regular visitors. If you use a CMS, such as WordPress, you can install a plug-in, such as W3 Total Cache or W3 Super Cache, any of which will allow you to enable caching throughout the site or caching certain elements of the site.

Reason 3: The site is running an old version of PHP

If your site has not been updated for a long time, and PHP5.4 or 5.6 is still connected to it, then the best option is to upgrade the site engine to a version compatible with PHP7.

What to do: translate the site into PHP 7 is another way to speed up the work of site scripts.

The performance of PHP 7, compared with earlier versions, has grown much more significantly, becoming one of the most attractive features of this thread. Our blog has a translation of a large article on PHP 7.3 performance testing.