Very very slow website

Support
#1

Hi,
I made a site using the X Theme a few years ago. It was always been very fast. It’s a pretty “static” site so I didn’t make any changes to it once I was happy with it.

About one month ago I noticed the site had suddenly become incredibly slow (like up to 1 minute to load one page). So I signed in to my admin page – which was also incredibly slow – and I basically updated wordpress, x theme and all used plugins. That seem to do the trick and the site was back to its normal speed.

The problem is that today I noticed my site was again super slow, and this time there is not much to update (I did update to the very latest version of X, but that didn’t do any good for the speed issue).

Could you please let me know what can be done to bring the site back to its normal speed ? And especially, what can be done to ensure this doesn’t happen in the future ? I don’t plan to change much to the site in the future and hope it can keep on being functional without me having to do anything to it.

Thanks in advance for your help.
site link : https://www.studio-ubik.com

#2

Hi Jerome,

Thanks for reaching out.
Unfortunately, the website speed related issue is beyond the scope of Theme Support, I would suggest you avail yourself of our newly launched product called Boost, where we help you with the site speed optimization.

Thanks

#3

Hello Tristup,

Actually I just bought a 6 month support pack from themeco just to address this issue. I’m pretty sure it’s related to a problem with X theme or a plugin, because as I explained my site was running nice and fast for over 2 years and I have changed strictly nothing on the website before it started to run slow. So it’s really not a question of optimising the site for speed, it’s a question of finding what’s causing the site to suddenly run slowly. Also, I did check with my hosting service, and the problem is not on their side since other services on my account are not affected.
I’ve always been very happy with your support, I hope it can stay this way !! Thanks in advance for your help.

#4

Thank you for the update and for continuing your support subscription. We checked the site on PageSpeed Insights, HTTP Status, and GTmetrix, but all of them failed to run a test and returned errors. This might mean that there is an issue with the server or its configuration.

We recommend doing the following steps to troubleshoot common issues: https://theme.co/docs/common-issues

And follow it up with these recommendations to improve performance: https://theme.co/docs/how-to-improve-site-performance

Did you install any security plugins? We recommend disabling the security plugin temporarily, switch the installation to debug mode and enable the error logs so we can check if there are issues with the site.

– https://developer.wordpress.org/advanced-administration/debug/debug-wordpress/#example-wp-config-php-for-debugging

Once you’ve completed the steps above, please provide the login details in the secure note so we can properly check the site. Better yet, if possible, create a staging or development environment using Duplicator or WP Migrate DB so we can debug the issue without affecting the live site.

Best regards.

#5

Hello Ismael,

Thank you for your message. I followed your advice. I tried activating the standard wordpress theme instead of X, which only made the site slightly faster.

Turning off SSL plugin (called really simple security) seemed to make the site (and especially the wp admin) even slower. So I re-enabled it.

I also deactivated all other plugins one by one, and that didn’t change anything, until I deactivated essential grid, which immediately made the site and the wordpress admin page fast again. So it must be a problem with essential grid. Actually, when I go in the essential grid admin page, it displays this message (see screenshot).

Screenshot 2025-04-03 at 17.59.24
Screenshot 2025-04-03 at 17.59.241592×1104 73.1 KB

However if I click “fix all addons” it just displays an error message: “Ajax error : addon could not be updated”. I don’t know if this alone is causing the slowness issue. As I stated before, I changed nothing to the site (including nothing in essential grid settings) and the site was previously fast,.

Could you please look into this ? Thanks a lot in advance.

#6

Thank you for the information. We can confirm that Essential Grid significantly slows down the site. Once the plugin is deactivated, httpstatus.io returns 200 OK instead of an error. We may have found the issue with the plugin, but to test it further, we’ll need S/FTP access. Please provide the details in the secure note.

This is the error: https://pastebin.com/3a4L5M1c

Best regards.

#7

Hello Ismael,
Thank you. I just added this to the secure note

#8

We are now investigating. Please stay tuned for our findings.

Thank you.

#9

Thank you for the info. We made a minor change in the cornerstone\includes\elements\classic_alternate\essential-grid.php file, around line 25, to replace the deprecated function Essential_Grid::get_essential_grids .

$essential_grids = class_exists('Essential_Grid_Db')
        ?  Essential_Grid_Db::get_entity('grids')->get_grids()
        : Essential_Grid::get_essential_grids();

However, this doesn’t completely fix the issue. We then noticed that the site is still using an older version of PHP (7.4.33). Upgrading the PHP version might improve compatibility with the Essential Grid plugin and help with site performance. Please upgrade PHP to version 8.1 or higher and let us know the result.

#10

There’s also an error or notice: Undefined index: S_NAMESPACE on /etc/hosteur/php_set_envs.php:40 . Please edit the said file and remove or comment out line 40. The FTP account doesn’t have access to this directory.

#11

Hello Ismael.

Thank you.
I upgrade PHP to 8.2. Didn’t seem to change much unfortunately.
About the error ( /etc/hosteur/php_set_envs.php:40) actually I don’t have access to this file either. However I have now asked my service provider to edit the file. Will let you know when they reply.

#12

We installed the Essential Grid plugin on our installation, and it didn’t slow down the site, which suggests that this is an issue with the server configuration or specifications. Please create a site backup, then delete the current Essential Grid plugin from the wp-content > plugins folder and reinstall it. Let us know if this changes anything.

We recommend asking your hosting provider to investigate the issue further. What are the actual specs of the server?

#14

So I deleted the essential grid folder from wp-content/plugins then reinstalled essential grid using X theme’s extensions pane.
Unfortunately this didn’t change anything. It did however keep all my grids. Maybe I should try deleting the plugin from the wordpress admin page, but this worries me a it, since although I do have a backup, Essential grid don’t recommend this ( https://www.essential-grid.com/faq/how-to-update-essential-grid ) ,

I asked my hosting provider about this :

----> they replied that that line was needed for their system and shouldn’t have an impact. Their however tried commenting out line 40 and they say it didn’t change anything.

They also gave me the server’s specs. It’s a 1vCPU, 1GB RAM for the apache web server, and a 1vCPU, 1GB de RAM for the mariadb 10.6. database server.
—> I realise this are probably low specs, but I want to stress again that my site ran just fine for years with these specs, up to a couple of weeks ago.

I’m really scratching my head about this one !

#15

Thank you for this info. The server specs are not great, but the site should not be running this slow. Upgrading the server is recommended, but not necessary if I’m not mistaken. Anyway, we also found a few critical errors in the Tools > Site Health panel, along with some recommendations to improve performance. Could you forward this info to your hosting provider, especially the error related to the REST API? The site is also not using HTTPS, and the Imagick extension for PHP is disabled. Fixing these issues should help improve the site’s performance.

Screenshot 2025-04-08 at 9.11.17 PM
Screenshot 2025-04-08 at 9.11.17 PM1876×1394 215 KB

#16

Hello Ismael,

I got replies from my hosting provider.

About the imagick module and the persistent objet cache, they said that they can only install them if I migrate to a dedicated VPS server. Again, my personal comment about this is that it worked for years without these features so why should I need these things now …

About the “Not all essential security headers are installed” , they have added them to my htaccess file.

About the API error, they said it’s about my site’s API. And it gives the error because the site is slow and in the end there is a timeout.

About the site not running https, actually I am using a let’s encrypt SSL , which is working and valid (can be checked when you visit the site).

I’m not sure what to try next. I think I might try to completely uninstall essential grid using the wordpress admin page, rather than just deleting the essential grid folder from wp-content/plugins as I tried before. This will also delete all my grids but I could reimport them from an previously saved export (there is an import/export function in essential grid).
If you have other or better suggestions I’m interested to know.

#17

Oh, and one more thing ; I just saw that the “There is a problem with some of Essential Grid addons” follow by “Ajax error : addon could not be updated” thing is back again … Actually I think this was never fixed. It just disappears when the essential grid google font add on is disabled. Maybe that’s part of the problem ?? So I tried uninstalling and reinstalling the google fonts add-on, but I also get an “ajax error : add-on could not be installed” and so it won’t let me install the add-on again.

Another thing is that the “services” page on my site is not displaying at all anymore (even when waiting the 30 + seconds for the page to load).

This keeps on getting worse :frowning:

#18

Thank you for the update. Since the Essential Grid plugin is working properly on our installation, we recommend cloning or moving the site to a different host or server. If the issue persists, it could be related to the existing grids or sliders, or — though less likely — a compatibility issue with the theme, as it works fine on our end. Do you have a backup of the grids? Please try to completely delete all grids in the Essential Grid plugin and let us know if the issue persists.

#19

Hey Jerome,

I tested the exact copy of your site on to a popular shared web host and it works fine. This means that what Ismael suspected is correct. This is an issue with your web host and not the Essential Grid or Essential Grid is in conflict with your web host only.

We understand that it just happened recently but that could also mean the there could have been changes in your web host setup.

The next steps for you to take is contact your web host again about our findings or swith to a new web host.

I have deleted the copy of your site after testing.

#20

Hello Christian,

I’m now in the middle of switching to a new web host, which seemed like the best thing to do since my current web host is not being helpful at all and always blames it all on my website…
So far it seems to be going great with the new web host, but I still need to do a few tests + to transfer the domain name to the new host. Thanks for all your help and I will let you know how it goes.

#21

Hello again,

So now nearly everything seems to be working on my website (currently at a temporary address before I transfer my domain). Pages are now fast again (actually faster than they ever were).

The only thing that is still an issue is that my “services” page, which is also my landing page, does not have its (essential) grid displaying properly. This is the case for both the english and french versions of my site. All other essential grid pages work fine. I thought I had found the solution, just by clicking “save grid” for the the “services” grid in the plugins wordpress interface, but this only makes the page load correctly once, if you do a refresh again the grid is not displayed. What could be going wrong now ?

I will give you the login details in a secure note.