I’m reaching out because I’m facing an issue with my Wordpress site and I can’t find a solution. My site’s RAM usage limit is being exceeded randomly even when I’m not actively using the site or logged out. My account even got suspended yesterday and I just got a warning email again today.
In case any of this extra info helps, the plugins my site uses are: Elementor, Yoast SEO, Unlimited Elementor Elements, UpdraftPlus Backups, W3 Total Cache, Starter Templates, WPForms Lite, and WP Mail SMTP. I’m not sure if any of these plugins might be causing the RAM usage because I’ve been getting ram usage warnings since late June early July before I had some of the plugins.
What really confuses me about all of this is that the RAM limit continues to be reached even when I’m logged out. I log in for the day, log back out, and then 2 hours later I randomly get a warning email. No, my website isn’t getting any traffic yet.
I also looked at the RAM limits article on the forum and I’ve tried to use caching and follow the tips, but I still have no idea what’s causing these RAM spikes.
Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.
I wish I could remove Elementor but I tried disabling it and unfortunately it just messes up the entire site.
I’ll try removing Updraftplus because when my site got suspended yesterday, about 4 hours prior, I did a backup with Updraftplus. But I’m confused. When you mean ‘remove’ are you saying remove it entirely or just disable it so that when I need to backup my site again I can reactivate it? And if I’m supposed to delete it how else am I going to backup my site? Sorry if this is a dumb question I’m still new to Wordpress and web hosting.
If your website theme is built on Elementor, then disabling Elementor will break your site. However, as far as we know right now, Elementor is often the cause for high RAM usage, so it’s likely that your account will be suspended over and over again until you disable Elementor.
So I’m sorry to say you may have to choose a different theme for your site which doesn’t rely on Elementor or other heavyweight site building plugins.
Ok so what I’ll do when my site gets reactivated is I’ll delete updraft plus and do a backup like the documentation says. And if my site is still hitting the RAM limit I’ll just delete everything and try to start a new site without Elementor, even though I really hope I won’t have to do that.
Please do let us know what helps to fix this and what doesn’t. We’re also still trying to get a more clear picture about what exactly triggers these suspensions, so we can provide helpful instructions on how to avoid it. If you could share your experience, that would help a lot!
TLDR: Delete Elementor, use Gutenberg (with an extra block plugin if you need one). Completely delete Updraft Plus (the proper way).
A couple of weeks ago, my site was randomly hitting the RAM limit even when I wasn’t using it (see Website randomly hitting RAM Limit even when not In use). Because of this, my account kept getting closed and I didn’t know what to do, but I was able to fix it. I also made a bunch of other changes and now my site is much faster. So here’s what I did:
The first thing I did was just delete Updraft Plus (only by pressing “delete” on WordPress. I didn’t go into the files and properly delete it.) I didn’t feel a significant speed increase/decrease and I still got a RAM usage warning email from just editing a post.
Then I took a break for about a week and disabled Elementor (I didn’t fully delete it yet) and already I stopped getting RAM limit warnings, which felt amazing. However, my site was still relatively slow.
In my Hosting Support post I didn’t talk about what theme I was using. I was using Astra. At the time I thought it was a heavyweight theme, so I removed it and got Kadence instead. I also disabled all of the other plugins I wasn’t using, to list: Yoast, WPforms, Starter Templates, and Unlimited Elementor Elements. I started rebuilding the pages and menus with the Gutenberg editor + the Kadence blocks plugin for Gutenberg.
It took a while but I finally finished redesigning all of the pages. It definitely didn’t take as long as I thought it would and I already had all the content so it was pretty easy. Ever since disabling Elementor I didn’t get a single RAM warning as I was rebuilding everything. I’d also like to say, Gutenberg felt SO MUCH better than Elementor. It was easier to use and felt a lot faster. So definitely ditch Elementor on free hosting.
I finally decided to completely delete all the plugins I had disabled including Elementor and my site got a LOT faster. I could definitely notice and it was significantly faster than when I didn’t have Elementor.
So that’s how I ended up fixing my site. Now, here are some additional things that I did to replace the plugins I had and speed it up:
The only 2 plugins I kept active the entire time were WP Mail SMTP and W3 Total Cache. I need SMTP because it’s the only way for my site to send emails. I also think W3 Total Cache speeds up my site even though it’s another plugin.
To replace YoastSEO and possibly another analytics plugin I was planning to get, I installed RankMath. I’ve done some research and I’ve found out that it’s a lot faster than Yoast and has more features.
When I removed Updraft Plus, to backup my website I was instead using FTP with Filezilla. But it was EXTREMELY slow and ended up taking 3-4 hours just for 1 backup until I found out that Updraft Plus and a bunch of my other plugins left databases, files that weren’t in the plugins folder, and etc. behind. I deleted those and did a backup today and it only took around 10 minutes. So yeah, significant difference.
So that’s everything I’ve done so far. I’m also planning (and wondering) how I can make my site even faster. I’m trying to use a lot the recommendations from this other post Themes and Plugins you recommend and don't recommend. The main plugins I’m looking into that are on that list are Asset Cleanup and replacing W3 Total Cache with Litespeed. I’m a bit skeptical on switching to Litespeed and the only reason why I’m considering it is because it has image optimization which I don’t think W3 Total Cache has, and if I want one I’ll have to install another plugin which might be slower than just installing one plugin for handling image optimization and cache. But at the same time, Litespeed doesn’t use InfinityFree’s servers. If anyone knows anything about this that would help.
Since making these changes, my site is running much faster and has not hit the RAM limit once. Here’s a speed test:
Let me know if there is any other info I can provide on what helped resolve this issue. I appreciate all the help your forum provided in getting my site fixed!
Thank you for the research you have done and the awesome set of recommendations! I’ll be sure to share it with people who are running into RAM limits and other performance problems with WordPress.
It’s the other way. LiteSpeed Server is a piece of server software that can be used as an alternative to Apache, and has some additional features for PHP-based websites, including a built-in caching system called LSCache. The LiteSpeed Cache plugin for WordPress interacts with the cache system in LiteSpeed.
Free hosting has a heavily customized web server stack with numerous optimizations that makes it work very well for free hosting. But it doesn’t include LiteSpeed so you cannot use LSCache.
Regarding the speed, there is one other thing you can do. If you setup a cron job to run the WP-cron file, it will help speed up the site if it has not been visited in awhile (Because tasks like updating plugins that have auto-update enabled will be taken care of with the cron job, instead of slowing down response time for your visitors).
