Previously-speedy X site now very slow on WP Engine hosting

[andisites]

We developed an X site (feldenkrais.com) which was working very quickly and happily on our development server at SiteGround. Now that it has been moved to its ultimate host at WP Engine, though, it is extremely slow. Going from page to page (especially in the back end) takes forever, and the site has been fully optimized. It also gets pretty high scores on Pingdom and GTMetrix, and all caching, Autoptimizing, and memory increases have been performed.

WP Engine can’t find anything wrong, and neither can we. The only difference is that our development server was running PHP 7 and the hosting server is not (they can’t upgrade because there are other accounts on the server with plugins that won’t work with PHP 7). The only thing they can point to is the X theme–they created a clone of the site that works very quickly with the default TwentySeventeen theme).

Are there known issues with X on WP Engine, and how can we solve them? Thanks so much!

[rubin]

Hey There,

We probably have thousands of customers using WPEngine without problems. Php7 is significantly quicker than a 5.x version so this might be one of the factors. 3rd Party Plugins or other things that add bloat could be also the cause. Normally the hosting support can figure this out quite easily. Our theme is written with best practise in mind and is a very lightweight application which should load and perform very good.