Website slow - any advice/knowledge would be appreciated!

[Gegrond]

Not sure if this is the correct section, but we need the help of some interwebz savvy people.

On the 5th of March 2021, afrihost webservers went down for a couple of hours, and when they came back online our website has been crazy slow to load.

It went from around 1-2seconds to 15+ seconds to load, that's to say if it loads, otherwise I just get "503 service unavailable" or "523 origin is unreachable".

Contacting Afrihost has not yielded any results, they just tell us it's cloudflare that is at fault.

If anyone can assist us in sorting this would highly be appreciated.

Website in question: www.gegrond.co.za

 

[𝐹𝓇𝒾𝓀𝓀𝒾𝑒𝒮𝓌𝒶𝑔]

Did a tracert to your website and as you can see from the picture it shows 1 timeout and 2 of the ip addresses almost timeout

Doing a whois reveals that those IP addresses belong to Afrihost

The cloudflare hop is below 100ms and the Afrihost hops are above 100ms

So could be that the issue is from Afrihost

https://imgur.com/a/7Xh3fIj

 

[The_True_Stefan]

Hi, no expert here but there are a few things worth checking -

Couple of questions to rule out some possibilities.

Which package do you have with Afrihost?
Did you build your website yourself?
Have you updated all plugins and themes?
Have you deleted / disabled all plugins which are not in use?

Let me know.

 

[MoRRaZ]

A few years back I had horrible ping and so one to Cape Town servers when I was with Afrihost, it turned out one of their datacenters in JHB were at fault because in the Trace Route the ping to JHB was 100ms+ just like in this screenshot and after that it was fine with 30-40ms.

Maybe ask them to look into that.

Also check the following if you can on your VM:

CPU Usage
Network Usage
HDD usage

 

[Gegrond]

Hi, no expert here but there are a few things worth checking -

Couple of questions to rule out some possibilities.

Which package do you have with Afrihost?
Did you build your website yourself?
Have you updated all plugins and themes?
Have you deleted / disabled all plugins which are not in use?

Let me know.

The Bronz Pro Linux package.
Yes built it ourselves, it's not the best but its worked out so far .
Over the weekend i updated everything, I also disabled all plugins with no luck.
Lastly cleared all cache on our website and on Cloudflare also with no changes.

Did a tracert to your website and as you can see from the picture it shows 1 timeout and 2 of the ip addresses almost timeout

Doing a whois reveals that those IP addresses belong to Afrihost

The cloudflare hop is below 100ms and the Afrihost hops are above 100ms

So could be that the issue is from Afrihost

https://imgur.com/a/7Xh3fIj

Thanks for this, I'll be contacting them again with this screenshot - hopefully something comes of it.

 

[𝐹𝓇𝒾𝓀𝓀𝒾𝑒𝒮𝓌𝒶𝑔]

No Worries

Hope you come right

 

[souljazk]

1) Backup site
2) Backup site again
3) Flush sites local cache.
4) Flush CF cache.
5) Update Wpcore & plugins.

Just read that you've done this already.

You'll need to revert from a backup before the issue happened & then update again. If you've done the above then I assume your database is having some issues? Would need to take a closer look at the site to more accurately say whats going on.

Show AH this - GTmetrix Performance Report

"

Backend Duration​

8.2s"

"

Connection Duration​

59ms"

Time to First Byte (TTFB)​

8.3s

Fully Loaded Time​

22.8s

No simple website with CF should get such 'scores'

 

[SantaMuerte]

Since it's a Wordpress site I'd recommend checking your PHP version in cPanel. Sometimes when they do maintenance it can change or reset. There's a chance it went back to PHP V 5.6. Change it to 7.3 / 7.4.

Happened to one of my clients recently. Changing the PHP version back to 7.4 solved the problem.

EDIT: Just a tip for Wordpress sites as well, enable gZip compression in cPanel.

 

[rinners]

Remove all Java libraries and stick to CSS.

It could just be the fonts etc taking long to load? Rather just redo graphics with the text already on it?

Seriously your <head> section is longer than a giraffes neck. #someoptimisationrequired

 

[Oj0]

503 is generally the server being overloaded. You might have a bad plugin or theme that's causing high server load. Check your usage logs next time you get a 503.

 

[dalion619]

Did a tracert to your website and as you can see from the picture it shows 1 timeout and 2 of the ip addresses almost timeout

Doing a whois reveals that those IP addresses belong to Afrihost

The cloudflare hop is below 100ms and the Afrihost hops are above 100ms

So could be that the issue is from Afrihost

It's your route to the website, you see Afrihost because they're probably your ISP.

The Bronz Pro Linux package.

Time to First Byte (TTFB)​

8.3s

This is the issue, it's probably caused by a HDD. Think of a fragmented disk and you're trying to read multiple files from different places.

EDIT: Just a tip for Wordpress sites as well, enable gZip compression in cPanel.

Ideally anything that would add overhead on the origin should be disabled like compression, CF can handle it.
The website seems to be using Brotli.

Remove all Java libraries and stick to CSS.

It could just be the fonts etc taking long to load? Rather just redo graphics with the text already on it?

Seriously your <head> section is longer than a giraffes neck. #someoptimisationrequired

Just LOL.

 

[Sub-lime]

GTmetrix Performance Report

GTmetrix Grade: F (Performance: 19% / Structure: 59%)

gtmetrix.com

Firstly, id highly recommend image optimization, a 4.5mb background is huge.
secondly, serve scaled images
thirdly, JS defer and bundle libraries (JS,CSS).


Aesthetically, adding a parallax effect on the mountain scape and hand holding the mug would give it more depth.
parallax.js <-- this idea.