For everyone of you, who use wordpress as a platform with shared hosting for his/her blog will know the importance of this post. So before i start writing about how to reduce server load due to wordpress on shared hosting, i would talk a bit on wha prompted me to write this.
My another blog Avinashtech – Software tips and tricks was hosted on a webhost which suspended my account as i have said in my previosu post due to high server use as they alleged. That all lead to me doing a bit of research on ways to reduce server load.
Many of you may not be knowing whats the limit of CPU usage you can have for your blog on your Shared hosting package. Generally this varies from 1-8% but webhosts that oversell put the limit to just 1% of total server resources.
As wordpress runs using php excuting so many queries through php, hence if your site isnt optimised it may result in your blog exceeding the server resource limit. Apart from just the wordpress, its the plugins often that result in excessive server usages. Normally every wordpress blog is run along with 5-10 plugins.
The few things you can do is start disabling few plugins which cause excess server load. I have identified some of the plugins and will talk about them. apart from this, you need to install a caching plugin that will produce static html pages to your visitors instead of excecuting php scripts.
So, you need to install a plugin called WP Super Cache . This is the best for wordpress caching pages of your blog. It helps reduce your server load as it generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. whenever visitors come to your blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.
And the plugins which you should deactivate and delete from your blog till you solve the server issue atleast :
- Google XML sitemap generator and
- Global translator plugin.
Google XML sitemap generator plugin generates XML sitemap for your blog which is needed for SEO. For this sitemap generation, it takes too much memory everytime you change something on your blog. This may take too much memory usage if your blog has too many posts. Even if you dont optimise this plugin option it may lead to high server usage. But sitemap is important. If you still want to use it, you need to optimise its settings. If someone want me to write about it, i will write a separate post for how to optimise settings for this plugin.
Other culprit may be Global translator plugin if you use its transaltion services . More resources if you have checked all 41 languages in its settings. The reason is it keeps connecting to translation engines like google to translate your pages every three minutes.
Also Global translator generates too many blog pages at same time in different languages. This often results in more spiders and robots of search engibne hitting your blog resulting in high server load. wana me write in more details about it, ask me to post a new post.
I hope these facts will help you solve your high server load problem on a shared hosting.
Thank You Very Much. I was looking for this solution as my website http://www.dailylatestnews.com also went down due to server load problem
Thnx a lot again. very useful post
hello, I would like to know more about how you otimized Google XML sitemap generator. Could you please send me this info to my email? augustodroit [arroba]hotmail.com . Thank you.
Yes please! Please tell us more about optimizing the XML sitemap plug in – I use that on a site I run, and I've been warned about high resource usage.
Yes please! Please tell us more about optimizing the XML sitemap plug in – I use that on a site I run, and I've been warned about high resource usage.
Thank you for the feedback mate. I have written a post on Google XML sitemap settings as you requested. Check it out here.
http://www.wpbuster.com/hosting/optimise-google…
Useful post.
Your hosting link in the post returns 404 error!
Hi AVINASH,
Is it possible to check which WP plugin has high resource usage?
Thanks,
I have come to know some MYSQL cache plugin which will not generate any static pages but store the queries in memory, does this have any effect on sever load?
Thanks
Is there any Hosting Company that provides 120 M Memory allocation to single resource script as majority do not offer more then 32 m memory limit
Thanks for this post. My site is currently down for this exact same reason, and until I can afford dedicated hosting, I’ll need to this. I haven’t changed my options from the default in the Google Sitemap plugin, so that’s the one that I’ll be tackling after I clear my site of unused plugins.
Thanks again
I am also currently experiencing this kind of issue , but instead of super cache i had installed W3 Tatal cache, so is it ok.
W3 total cache is excellent cache plugin if you are able to configure it to full extent.
Thanks Avainash for your response but these steps are not seems to be enough to lower down server usage as our webhost is saying us to move to premium hosting plan or VPS server due to high traffic but, we are not in state to pursue those costly servers at this time .So could you suggest more thing ,if you can to lower down our site server usage on a shared server.
Thanks
It would have helped me to answer your query if you had left your website address in the comment field.
Ok Avinash you got site
As i got the suspended accounts page, its not helping me. One of the way right now is to, disable plugins for sometime and do a repair or optimisation of your wordpress database using phpmyadmin. Hopefully it will solve a bit of load issue.
Also, can you provide a bit of traffic details per day? If your site had been up, I would tried to see if anything more i could do to help you.
Hello avinash our site is up now but for some time only as it is under monitoring .so could you please suggest more of your optimisation tips.
Thanks
I just went to your site. I found two missing files on your home page. Just use pingdom tools to identify those files.
Also, just do a wordpress database optimisation as i said before. Check out my latest post f you wana know how to do it. And if still the problem persist, change your webhost as I do not see your traffic big enough. Also, you didnt told me how many plugins and which , are running on your blog.
I just received notification from my hosting company regarding this very issue, however, it’s related to the wp-cron.php file and the plugins for RSS feeds for Twitter, Blogs, Flickr. When I place these in widget spaces in the footer or sidebars.
Here’s the note from the hosting company -
It has come to our attention that your hosting account for xxxxxx is causing an overload of the shared resources on this server. This, in turn, affects the usage of the server by other customers. To protect the overall health of the server, we have added to the http://mydomain.com .htaccess file: order allow,deny deny from DNS # allow from all
Please be advised that this generally happens when you have a broken WordPress module installed.
Do you have any advice on this? Because I would like to continue using the Flickr, Twitter, RSS feeds on my sites.
Thanks.
@Dave,
wp-cron.php relates to something which is scheduled by wordpress and it may be related to plugin like xml sitemap generator or wordpress automatic backup plugin.
If you had told me the names of plugins you are talking about, I could have given a better reply.
I has made this blog for showing the demo of templates for downloading visitors are redirected to mediafire in anew window will this increase the load on my web host i fear for my account suspension as they not responding positively kindly send in my mail. thanking you…
I have also been suspended by hosting providers due to high load server. The reason is auto translate plugins. I have installed wp super cache, but it’s not enough.
Do you have other solutions?
jonas and others, i dealed with this for a long time, hostV technicians didnt have a clue either, the problem is that my wordpress template called gramaphonica, contained 3 lines calling to .js files, i checked that the files with more cpu time consuming were these files but they didn’t exist so i removed these lines from all my sites and now the server is back 3.0 4.0 2.0 loads. ALSO put a favicon on every site you have, the robots one dont think its so necessary but it works. Best wishes my friends
Thanks for this… really needed this I got an email from my hosting company as well
I hope it works
Hi,
Thank’s for this great tips and information.I face the same problem and fixed it after read your post.Thank you.
Glad to know that the post did help you fix your problem.
Glad to see this post. Just encountered similar problem and after deactivated both plugins, my hosting provider confirmed that the server activities back to normal again. Thank you very much.
Hi Avinash! First of all great site! Like you my site went down due to high server load.
I dont have sitemap generator installed and just installed super cache,
Can you check out my site and let me know what else needs to be fixed?
I already deleted all the other plugins im not using and im just now using the bare essentials.
Hope you can help me out.
@Carlos,
After looking over your site, even though it loads fine still you can try few things. Just try using a minifier and reduce external javascript files. You can use WP-minify plugin along with wp super cache. OR you can go for w3 total cache instead of wp super cahce+ wp minifier. Keep in mind that w3 total cache plugin can be a bit confusing as its a bit advanced but great plugin.
thanks for the reply Avinash
Ive been hearing great reviews about the w3 total cache but i just havent downloaded it because of the installation tricky installation procedures. unlike some which is just plug and play.
i will try minifier like you suggested.
also most of the pics on my website im hosting on a separate host (photobucket) does that add to my server load?
reason for this is i didnt want to clog up my host space.
Images on a separate domain is good. It doesnt add to your server load.
let’s say i host my imaged on a different server and then use them in my blog post, would that affect reduce server load???
Hi friends.
In just a week i moved three hosting companies two are vps with 2gb rams even then i faced the problem of high cpu and ram usage,Now i moved to a dedi box,but later i’ve taken a vps with 512ram and did some optimization and its working perfectly well.
Here iam sharing the tips for you,
1.Take a xen vps with atleast 512ram you can get them below 15$ a month.
2.Ask the hosting company to install nginx and varnish cache too.
3.Dont use w3tc cache,instead of it use quickcache and db cache reloaded.
4.Use a theme which has less images and optimised for speed.
Follow these 4 tips and you will definitely feel much much better.
@wpbuster, Create a post explaing these things better.First try a lowend vps and configure as i said then you can experience the boost.And with your own experience write an article
have a nice day
rocky
I think its better to seperate images on domains to lessen the servers workload.
How do you mean separate images ?
For seprating images, you need to create a sub domain for your blog and then transfer images to it so that images can load in parallel while the site is loading.
One more thing, super cache, should we chose to go through mod_rewrite or php ? i gues mod_rewrite ?
mod_rewrite is better unless you got some restrictions on it by your web host.
Thank you very much. Now I can reduce high load for the shared hosting and avoid account suspension
I just had sever crash just now. Thanks for this article
Avinash, how about Quick Cache. I am using it right now. Do you think it is good to use it and similar to WP Supe Cache?
W3 total cache is the best cache plugin at the moment which includes almost everything.
Thanks for the post, please can u run a check on http://www.nigerianuniversitynews.com and see why the server is always crashing