How To Quickly Test If Your Web Host Or Your Site Setup Is Destroying Your Page Loading Speed

By Terry Kyle
Chief Dog Lover/Co-Founder WPX.net (With Georgi Petrov, CEO)
Arguably The World’s Fastest WP Host

As the co-founding CEO of probably the world’s fastest WordPress hosting company, I have seen some crazy crazy stuff over the years: pages generating 500+ requests (Amazon.com is around 200, by the way), 200+ (honestly!) plugins on a WP site, updates not done on a site for many years and being constantly hacked and 10+ ad networks all serving ads at the same time to a page, making it crawl like it’s in in wet cement.

You get the idea.

When it comes to websites and website speed, one inescapable truth emerges:   

"the most powerful computer in the world will struggle to shift a horrible website"

My favorite testing method to quickly resolving this – especially with WPX customers – is to install an empty default WP site into a test subdomain as the hosting account where the problematically slow site also lives: same server, same specs, same overall server load and same hosting account.

For example, if I want to compare how the configuration of my personal blog at terrykyle.com is impacting page loading speed, I need a BENCHMARK of what a hosting server is capable of with an empty, almost plugin-free site first.

Then I can COMPARE and instantly rule in/out whether there is a hosting server issue (lame host probably) or something that I did as the webmaster that has screwed with the optimum performance of the site.

Though there are big flaws in these tools and the way the results are interpreted – I wrote about it here and here – these are the results for terrykyle.com on Pingdom Tools (Washington DC):

and here is an empty default WP site on exactly the same WPX server:

Interesting, huh?

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