Dear friends, I just moved a website from my localhost to InfinityFree via FTP, and I’m unpleasantly surprised to find that the homepage and every other page within it takes a very long time to load. Around 20 seconds. The website is built on WordPress with Elementor, but optimized with CloudFlare and NitroPack. I’ve removed any unused plugins, and files like images are compressed. I have another site that’s twice as large, also hosted with InfinityFree, but its load time is decent, without being too fast. I understand that this service is free, and I appreciate it, but a 20-second wait time is terrible. I also don’t think it’s due to WordPress itself, because I imagine half of the pages hosted on InfinityFree must be built on that CMS, which would mean half of the threads on this forum must be for that reason, but that’s not the case.
On the other hand, I want to rule out an external problem. For example, some changes, like the main font, only appear on mobile, but not on desktop. The website in question is this:
I ran a website speed test and it confirms your website is indeed pretty slow: almost 14 seconds to load the home page.
The speedtest also shows that over 13 seconds of that page load time, the client is waiting for the server to respond. This is the time it takes to execute the PHP code of your page.
Elementor is a very heavy plugin, and doesn’t work well on our hosting. I’m not sure if this is the reason for your performance issues, but it’s something to look into.
Cloudflare does nothing at all to help solve the performance problems you’re having. Cloudflare can help cache static files and deliver them more quickly to your visitors, but it will not speed up your PHP code.
I’m not that familiar with NitroPack. A quick look at their website tells me that they are both doing cache (which is good - that helps optimize PHP execution time) and asset optimization. But asset optimization (compression and minification of images and code) will at best not help your PHP execution time, and at worse just add more work to the pile, slowing everything down.
They also have a CDN, but you already have that through Cloudflare.
I also see you have WP Optimize and WP Rocket installed. Be very careful with having multiple plugins that provide similar features. Double the optimization plugins don’t generate double the benefit, you get the same benefits but only double the overhead.
Using performance optimization plugins is a good idea. But do consider what exactly they optimize and whether that’s something that should be optimized, what downsides they may have, and definitely make sure you don’t duplicate functionality.
Are there any other differences that might be relevant? Such as:
Which plugins are installed and which theme do they use?
How are these plugins and themes configured?
Any other differences between the sites that could explain the performance issues?
If you want, you could try moving one site to the account of the other to rule out any performance differences between servers. All accounts are distributed over different servers, and while we try to balance everything well and ensure equal performance for everyone, that’s not so straight forward in reality.
WordPress can do almost anything with the right plugins. But this also means that it can either be blazingly fast or ungodly slow depending on what you load it up with.
I checked your website, seems like just a landing page no complicated function so i recommend you to clone your website in static page (html, css, js, image,..) and upload it back, it will be faster than ever
here is how to do it: first use winhttrack (windows, on mac and linux you can use the curl command, still do the same thing) to download all of your website assets, after you done make sure to check the downloaded assets to see if it working properly or not, next use filezilla to download all of your website source code in case you want to roll back, and upload all of that assets to your hosting and done, now your website will run as fast as your internet connection
No, don’t do that. You will end up with a broken website at worse, and a bunch of useless assets making your site take longer to load at best. If your going to rework it, do it the right way, not the “scrape the Wordpress front end and hope it works” way.
the time did it more than my finger now and all the time it work, overall his site is just a landing page, no need to login to use so it is the best way in my opinion, elementor is very heavy and run garbage on free hosting, very worth trying
Converting to a static site is a valid suggestion (depending on OP’s plans for their site) but as GR9 pointed out, scraping the site’s frontend isn’t the ideal way to do it. The better choice would be to run the site locally using LocalWP, and then use Simply Static to export it as a static website. That way you know the site’s design and all of the assets will work properly.
That’s ultimately up to the OP though. They might plan to add interactive elements in the future. You are right that using Elementor on InfinityFree is not a good idea, though.
Hello. Yes, I understand, but the load is too much. I’m sure the vast majority of websites use Elementor for website creation, but with optimized resource usage, I think it’s possible to manage it this way. In any case, I’m almost certain Elementor isn’t the problem, since a 20-second load time is quite abnormal.
Hello. Thank you very much for your detailed response. Indeed, I’m also considering that this may be due to an external issue, as it’s unusual for the website to load in around 20 seconds, after several tests. I’ll add some additional information:
I removed NitroPack and WPRocket and only used WPOptimizer.
It seems that the cache service wasn’t working, even after reloading the website, the wait time was the same.
The loading time of the internal sections was the same.
Sometimes the styles in the CSS file don’t load.
In some browsers, it fails to load due to a cookie issue, even though I grant them the necessary permissions.
I’ve tested that some changes, such as changing the main font, aren’t displayed, not even when I’m in the WordPress console, much less when I try to view it in the final URL (although, interestingly, I can see it on my mobile device).
Perhaps the most important thing to note is the following. I developed this project on localhost using WAMP, but for some time now my PC has been getting too slow, taking a long time to open tabs or programs and preventing me from defragmenting my hard drive. Even so, I exported everything via FTP to InfinityFree before formatting my PC to avoid losing that work, something I was only able to accomplish today by performing a clean install via a USB drive since, for some reason, Windows couldn’t even format the system from the cloud. Well, I’m mentioning all this to highlight the possibility that some problem may have occurred, such as file damage or corruption, and that this may have been transferred to the host. Something like this seems quite odd to me, but I’m mentioning it as a possibility. I beg you to help me resolve this, as it’s important to get the website up and running as soon as possible.
Probably not here. It is a known issue that Elementor is too heavy of a plugin to run properly on InfinityFree. The RAM and CPU power you get with the free accounts technically doesn’t meet the official requirements for it.
If you really need a block editor, you might want to consider switching to the official Gutenberg editor, which is built in to WordPress.
A 20 second page load time is definitely not normal, I think we can all agree on that.
Please note that we don’t provide a caching service, any caching functionality is provided by your WordPress plugin.
Caching can help with performance, but it’s not guaranteed to fix everything. Sites with caching can still be slow.
Also, please note that cache is usually disabled for logged-in users, because their pages may have personalized content. So random visitors may have a better experience than you do.
This doesn’t sound like a performance issue to me. And I didn’t see any issues like that.
One possible explanation that comes to mind is that the different optimization plugins you were using may have caused some issues here. Remember that some of them modify your CSS to optimize it, and if this goes wrong, you may not have CSS at all.
That sounds more like a browser issue to me than a website issue.
This could just a consequence of the use of caching. Caching works by doing the work once and then storing the result to reuse it. If you then change something, the cached version of the content (before the changes were made) will still be used, meaning the changes do not take effect. This should resolve itself automatically over time as the cache expires.
File corruption issues typically cause website code to not function correctly at all, they shouldn’t cause performance issues.
All in all, it seems you’re having multiple issues here, and it’s very likely that there is not a single cause for all of them. But here are a few things you may want to try to see if you can solve it:
Test the website from a different device and network. A PC that’s falling apart might have issues opening websites too. Checking it from a different device, preferably on a different network, could help eliminate any issues caused by the computer itself.
If you suspect the files are corrupted, then reupload them. The source code of WordPress and any plugins and themes should be readily available. Reuploading them to your website should fix any corrupted files: How to fix a corrupted WordPress installation
Switch back to the default WordPress theme to rule out Elementor as a cause. I understand that you want to keep using Elementor, but Elementor is a beast that tends to cause a lot of issues, so it would be good to confirm whether it’s causing issues here or not.
Try disabling all plugins and see if it helps. If it does, try re-enabling them one-by-one to see which one is causing the issues.