Is your WordPress dashboard very slow? The reason could not be hosting but the server and type of plan. Plugins and PHP code can also slow down wordpress control panel.

If you are using shared hosting, then the same resources are shared across many users. It slows down the site and also wordpress admin.

Most hosting use Apache/Nginx as their server. But I found that they are not fully optimized.

Instead if you could opt for LiteSpeed server, you can speed up wordpress admin.

I recently changed to a LSCache server. The admin panel was quick and I could easily change from one option to another.

You make a post, edit, save, upload images, install plugins, quick edit, add category, tags, themes, css code and many other operations.

Bad hosting, too many plugins, big database size, low wordpress memory limit, dashboard widgets, too many posts can make wordpress backend extremely slow.

WordPress Site Optimization also plays a major significance in improving the speed of wordpress admin panel.

If the wordpress admin slow issue comes back after optimization of hosting and plugins, you have to find the real cause.

In this blog post we are going to see easy solutions to fix the wordpress slow admin problem.

1. Check with Hosting

The first and foremost weapon to resolve this issue is whether your hosting is quick enough or not.

Recommended hosting are –

  1. Cloudways
  2. DreamHost
  3. GreenGeeks
  4. BlueHost
  5. SiteGround

You might be on shared hosting or dedicated server or VPS hosting or cloud hosting. All these have some inherent issues from time to time.

fast hosting to fix slow wordpress admin panel

If you have taken a bad hosting like Hostinger or Hostgator, whatever changes you do to the technical faults of WordPress dashboard will not resolve the issue.

CDN like free Cloudflare plan with other settings, can also improve your site performance. It reduces the latency between your browser and server. The site files being nearer to your location, it has the benefit of fetching the resources quickly.

This is because the basic foundation itself is corrupt.

WordPress Slow Admin Panel

Update:

The current WordPress version is 6.0.2. Many of the security bugs and errors were fixed in the latest version. I also observed that HostGator is not fast enough as other hosting servers.

I have tried InMotionHosting, SiteGround and DreamHost. These were quite fast enough. Also, shared hosting can give some problems.

In 2022, I have changed to HostArmada’s Speed Reaper plan. It uses LiteSpeed Server and cache. I have seen fast loading times and file manager is also quick.

I was able to fix slow wordpress related problems by using this technique. DreamHost’s shared hosting plan is not as good as it is in 2019.

If you take VPS or Cloud plans, the problem may go away. But these are costly. Currently I’m using DreamHost’s DreamPress plan for one of my sites.

I found that WordPress Dashboard and page load speed are good. I was using HostGator in 2013. So there might be several changes. So before you purchase hosting plans, check with their support team for speed.

WooCommerce plugins add lot of widgets to the dashboard. They too can slow down the admin panel.

In some cases, you can talk to the technical support team of your hosting like DreamHost or SiteGround and they can resolve the backend problems.

It all depends on the CPU, RAM, type of server, SSD or HDD and all the technical things involved in the server.

You can always check with a pagespeed tool like GTMetrix or WebPageTest, to find the fault in the waterfall model.

If the issue is with server speed then you need to first check with the hosting, whether they are giving enough resources to you or not.

Related Post :   How to Fix WooCommerce Backend Slow Problem?

2. Resource Intensive Plugins

The WPBeginner website has more than 200 plugins and still they run smoothly.

This is because they either have a good WordPress developer who optimizes their site or use the less resource intensive plugins.

But how do you know which plugin is causing the issue?

Query Monitor is a great WordPress plugin at finding the performance and speed lag caused by the plugins.

  1. Install and Activate the plugin.
  2. Click the New option in the WordPress dashboard interface.
  3. Go to Queries by Component on the left-hand side panel.
  4. Time taken to load the plugin is mentioned in the last column.

If it’s too high either delete the plugin or find an alternative one.

query monitor check plugins wordpress dashboard slow

3. Optimize the Database

Why Is My WordPress Dashboard So Slow? Sometimes, remnants of bad plugins can increase the database.

You have tried different plugins on your WordPress site and deleted them, not liking them! But the plugin author is not good enough to clean the garbage.

This is where DB optimization plugins come into plan.

I use the WP Sweep plugin to clean the transient options from time to time. Also it can optimize the database with a single click.

4. Numerous Posts on WordPress Dashboard

The posts item on the left hand side of the wordpress dashboard lists all your articles.

This number is limited to 20 by default. But if you have 1500 posts and would like to see all these things at once, you can increase the number.

But there is a catch!

Too many images can also slow down your site. Image optimization is another requirement for a fast wordpress admin panel.

For each post, there are a lot of other items like date published, author, number of comments, tags, categories and many others. If you don’t uncheck these items, this data will also load on each WordPress operation of posts.

It takes a toll on the server resources and your wordpress admin panel can become slow. The best way is to limit the number of posts per page to 50 or 60.

Though you need to click Next to see other posts. Though it is little uncomfortable, it can help to speed up the wordpress admin panel.

Even if your hosting server is fast enough, if you have too many posts meta on the dashboard, it will never improve the admin panel speed.

5. Increase WordPress PHP memory limit

After all, the coding of WordPress is done in PHP.

If you don’t allocate enough memory, then your WordPress admin dashboard is bound to become slow.

Generally, bad hosting services limit these resources by default on shared hosting plans.

WordPress Admin Slow Loading

Even reseller hosting services buy from a good branded hosting service and reduce these resources.

In such a case, you need to talk to the technical support team to either increase the PHP memory limit or you can do it yourself.

Go to the root of your WordPress installation. You will find the wp-config.php file. Update the following code.

define(‘WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ‘256M’);

This memory limit of 256MB should be sufficient enough to resolve the slow wordpress panel problem.

6. Upgrade WordPress version

Security vulnerabilities in the SQL code or plugins, can slow down things.

WordPress owners release a new updated version from time to time to improve the safety of the installation.

Also a good hosting will include a firewall or suggest a good security plugin, to prevent bots and hackers installing or injecting code into your installation.

In such cases, it is better to scan your WordPress installation for any malware and re-install WordPress.

Related Post :   How to Speed Up Slow WordPress Backend?

The latest stable version of WordPress is 5.8.1. Always check for any problems with the latest version and then update.

7. Use Proper Caching Plugin

Even good plugins like WP Rocket do not perfect page caching on all sites and hosting services.

For example, my host DreamHost said that it is not completely caching my site.

Since many WordPress sites contain static content, it is better to convert the dynamic pages to static resources.

In addition you have too many JavaScript and Images that add to the bloat of the site.

You can install a plugin like WP Super Cache for proper page caching and increase the WordPress dashboard speed and operations.

fast caching plugin wordpress admin panel slow

8. Use Heartbeat Control

The WordPress Heartbeat API has some benefit of auto-saving blog posts and communication between your browser and server.

It makes AJAX requests for every 15 or 60 seconds, to perform these operations.

This can be the additional cause of the slow WordPress dashboard.

In addition if there are resource intensive plugins, bad hosting service and bloated DB, it can fill your CPU and memory limit quickly.

control wordpress heartbeat wp rocket

WP Rocket has a good feature of “Control Heartbeat” with their pro version. You can do the following operations.

  1. Reduce activity in the backend.
  2. Behaviour activity in the post editor.
  3. Activity in the front end.

This will limit the WordPress dashboard from contacting the server every few seconds. You can als use other plugins to control the Heartbeat API frequency.

9. ISP can be Slow

The least problems and many times the cause for slow wordpress admin can be in the Internet speed itself. If you are either using 3G Mobile or 4G Internet connection with poor-connectivity speeds, the connection between your browser and server can slow down.

Recently I had the wordpress dashboard slow problem.

Initially I thought that my Internet connection must be slow. So I checked some other sites like yahoo.co.in which I visit frequently.

They were doing great at amazing speed.

isp speed test

Fast page load can be achieved if you have the right CDN and asset optimization. In this case study, you can see how I was able to load my site within 90 secs using Cloudflare.

10. Poor Database Optimization

They were fast. Since I was using shared hosting on HostGator, I thought there was some server problem.

So I contacted my HostGator support. I used both email and ticket support.HostGator.comHostGator

Ticket: PBN-28928813
Hello there,

Thank you for contacting HostGator! I understand that you are seeing slow loading speeds for your WordPress admin area in regards to moving posts to the trash. While investigating this issue I found some fragmentation in your database which may be contributing to this issue.
——————————————————————————–
shrxxxx_tech.wp_coxxxxxtmeta is 96.77% fragmented.
shrxxxx_tech.wp_coxxxxnts is 75.66% fragmented.
shrxxxx_texx.wp_links is 100.00% fragmented.
——————————————————————————–

I’ve optimized your database’s disk usage which should speed up queries to it. I then logged into your site and created a test post named HG Test and deleted it. It took about 2-3 seconds for this action to complete which is slightly slower than normal but not by much.

How Plugins can Slow WordPress Dashboard ?

WordPress sites have many resources.

Plugins are one of them. Each plugin functions as a code.

But most of them leave remnants when uninstalled. Also they can add bulk of the database, if the plugin is not coded properly.  As can be seen below, some of the plugins were causing issues.

Hosting server plays a main role in the speed of WordPress dashboard.

Shared hosting can reduce the speed of operations like publishing and adding images to the site.

Related Post :   Google PageSpeed Insights - Errors in Mobile and Desktop

Page Speed Optimization plugin can also make your site blazingly fast.

I also see that you have several plugins that are most likely being called when these actions are taking place which is likely the culprit here.
——————————————————————————–
Google XML Sitemaps
WP Sitemap Page
WordPress SEO
WP-PostViews
Contextual Related Posts
——————————————————————————–

Plugins are normally the cause of any slow speed issues with WordPress. I would suggest disabling all of your plugins for testing purposes and then re-enable each of them one at a time testing in between each one. This way you can find the plugin causing this issue.

If you have any further questions or need additional assistance, please let us know.
Thanks and have a great day!

John P.
Linux Systems Administrator
HostGator, LLC
https://support.hostgator.com/

Though the email chat support took some time to initiate, it also gave a similar solution.

Another noticeable thing is that, my WordPress websites automatically update to the newer versions.

Though updates like 3.8.3, 3.9.0 didn’t cause any problem, 3.9.1 noticeably slowed my WordPress Admin operations.

Wordpress Panel Slow
How To Activate Deactivate WordPress Plugins At once

FAQ – Answers to WordPress Admin Loading very slow

Why is my WordPress so Slow?

The reason for wordpress not working to full potential could be unoptimized code, server, cache and plugins. The initial response time could be very slow. If the plugins are not updated to use the latest PHP version, compression of images and cache not working properly are some reasons. Enable Redis or memcache object caching.

How to make WordPress Admin faster?

The best way to speed up wordpress admin is to rule out ISP speed. Slow connection could lead to slow wordpress admin. Choose a better host, plan, cache, server, proper cdn, reduce resource intense plugins. Make sure that minification and asset optimization is not causing any slow issues. Reduce the number of wordpress dashboard widgets.

Why is Hostgator Hosting slow?

After EIG has taken over HostGator, it has become tremendously slow. Check the TTFB or response times of the server. If it’s more than 600ms, then its hostgator issue. Also, shared hosting plans are not that optimized. Also, HostGator does not provide any CDN. You have to make use of Cloudflare or point to fast DNS servers. Optimize images and remove wordpress bloat. Make use of cPanel based hosting like GreenGeeks.

Why is WordPress Admin Dashboard is not displaying properly?

Make sure not too many widgets are on the wordpress dashboard. Also, cookies and caching mechanisms could cause the problem. Update your browser to the latest version. Try loading the wordpress site dashboard in incognito mode. Logout and Login back to your dashboard. Clear cache before it. Check if any proxy is in use. Deactivate the plugins and use default theme. Check the dashboard display again.

How to Speed Up WordPress Backend?

So if you are facing a similar problem like mine, deactivate all your plugins.

  1. Then try to activate half of the plugins. See if the problem is gone.
  2. If yes, then the problem lies in the rest of the disabled plugins. Reactivate half of them. Check the speed again.
  3. If no, then deactivate half of the remaining plugins. In this way, you need to find the cause of slow wordpress admin panel.
  4. Or else, you can reactivate all of them again at once. This is using check-box option present in WordPress Admin panel.

It should normally bring back the speed of your WordPress saves, edits, deletes etc. It’s also important that you have few plugins as possible.

Bad plugins can also impact the site loading speed and Admin panel operations.

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