WordPress Site Running Slow Since An Upgrade? Try This.

Disclaimer: some of you are going to face-palm at the obviousness of this solution, but if I was stupid enough not to think of it for a few weeks, I’m guessing a few others are too (no offense guys; we’re all on the same boat).

Has your WordPress Dashboard been running noticeably slower since upgrading to WordPress 3.3.1? Mine was – not just on one site, but on all of them. Mainly, the problem was with my personal blog, as that is where I spend the majority of my time.

For a few weeks, the issue straddled that line between not quite being irritating enough to make me want to do anything about it, and wanting to throw my computer out of the window. The other day I had some spare time on my hands, so decided to finally sort the problem out.

Initially, I couldn’t figure out what the problem was – I spoke with my hosting company and they assured me that there were no problems on their end. I ran the P3 Performance Profiler Plugin and deactivated all the heavy duty plugins (that was actually a valuable exercise which I heartily recommend, as I had far too many erroneous plugins installed).

In the end, the solution was in fact very simple – I just needed to clear my browser’s cache. I’m not the technical type, so I cannot give you an in-depth explanation as to why this fixed the problem, but my assumption is that my browser was holding onto some pre-update files that were messing with the new version of WordPress.

So if your WordPress site is running slowly, clearing your cache is the first thing you should do. This should in fact be your first port of call for many browser-related issues. And previously unbeknownst to me, you do not need to delete your browser’s precious history and cookies in order to clear the cache.

Through the magic of Google Analytics, I know that around 90% of you use one of three browsers. (As an aside, for those of you still using Internet Explorer – seriously? Come on…) So I have included instructions for clearing the cache of those three below:

• Google Chrome
• Firefox
• Safari

Creative Commons photo courtesy of minds-eye

Tags:

• browsers
• caching