As you’ve probably noticed, a slow website will make your experience miserable as a visitor of that website. Same goes for the WordPress admin. If you are a website owner and need to wait several seconds on each page load, you will have a problem, as the user experience will be very frustrating and totally unproductive. In this article, we suggest a few steps you can take to solve this issue and regain your sanity.
Check if your themes, plugins, and WordPress core are up-to-date. If they are not, backup your website and update everything. Once this is done, check if you are using the latest available and stable PHP version. If it’s not the case, switch to the newest version. PHP, the WordPress core, themes, and plugins, often remove bugs and improve performances with their newer versions, thus the potential for better performance after upgrading.
To remove bloat from the WordPress admin (and the rest of your website), you don’t even need to be a technical person. All you need is to install the Disable Bloat for WordPress & WooCommerce plugin. Once installed, you can see in the settings that there is a “Admin panel optimization” panel where you can optimize your WordPress admin. Unfortunatly, in this panel, a lot features are covered only by the Pro version of the plugin, but it may be worth buying it.
When using this plugin, you should be careful and know what you are doing. For example, you can disable the WordPress editor autosave feature, which can cause performance issues. If you or some of your users rely on this feature because you don’t save often enough, you should not enable it.
Even though you may already be using page or browser caching on your website, it will not impact your admin panel, as the WordPress admin changes all the time. On the other hand, object caching can cache frequently accessed data objects, which would help to load the WordPress admin data faster. However, object caching cannot be activated as a plugin, but should be installed at the hosting level, so you should check with your web host whether it’s possible to use object caching on your server.
Some WordPress plugins are notorious for eating up your memory like there is no tomorrow. For example, WordFence, the security plugin, needs some adjustment in order to be more efficient. There are some lists of WordPress that are famous for using too much memory, but as updates are very quick to be released with WordPress, these lists can quickly be outdated.
Instead, I suggest to find out which plugins use too much memory by using Query Monitor, which shows a developper panel within your WordPress install, whether on the front-end or in the WordPress admin. After you’ve installed the plugin, you should look for slow plugins this way:
Although this may not be the central issue to your slow WordPress admin, removing bloat from your database will not hurt and might actually help a little to make your WordPress admin a bit faster. One of the main issues you may face with the database is that you may have too many expired transients that remain there. It would be a good idea to remove these expired transients, you can do it easily by using this plugin.
Sometimes, the issues lies in the infrastructure, not in the website. Check your webhosting performances to see if changing it would be a good option. One way to get a rough idea of your hosting’s speed is to use a TTBF (time to first byte) measuring tool. You can do it with Byte Check or SpeedVitals, for example. Also, take a look at what your hosting offers (PHP version, maximum memory allocation,…) and compare it to other webhosts. Changing webhosts can take some time and effort, but it may be worth it sometimes.
As you can see, you will probably have to go through a phase of trial-and-error to find out what’s the problem with your website, as slow WordPress admin can caused by a wide range of issues. In case you try all of these and it doesn’t work, or that you find this too difficult technically, do not hesitate to contact us.
