Why your site is slow, in the order worth checking

Most "slow hosting" tickets turn out to be four or five recurring causes. Work down this list before you upgrade the plan.

Uncached pages

Check whether the page cache is actually being hit: our response carries an x-cache header. Logged-in sessions, cart pages and anything with a query string usually bypass the cache by design, so a site that is fast when you are logged out and slow when you are logged in is behaving normally.

One heavy query

Slow query logging is on by default and the results are in the panel. In practice a single unindexed query on a large table accounts for most of the gap, and it is almost always in a plugin rather than the theme.

Images that were never resized

A 4000-pixel photograph scaled down in CSS still transfers every one of those pixels. Serve modern formats at the size you display, and let the CDN do the conversion rather than doing it at upload time.

Third-party scripts

Tag managers, chat widgets, heatmaps and A/B testing tools are loaded from someone else's server, and your page waits for them. Measure with them blocked; if the difference is a second or more, that is your answer and no amount of CPU will fix it.

Then, and only then, resources

If the cache is warm, queries are indexed, images are sized and third parties are trimmed, and it is still slow, the plan is genuinely too small. Resize a cloud instance in one reboot and measure again.