Managing your server and hosting for speed – Speed It Up – Episode 6

[00:00:04] Nathan Wrigley: This episode of the WPBuilds podcast is brought to you today by OmniSend, the top rated email and SMS marketing platform for WordPress. More than 100, 000 merchants use OmniSend every day to grow their audience and sales. Ready to start building campaigns that really sell? Find out more at www. omnisend.

com. And by GoDaddy Pro, the home of managed WordPress hosting that includes free domain, SSL, and 24x7 support. Bundle that with the Hub by GoDaddy Pro to unlock more free benefits to manage multiple sites in one place. Invoice clients and get 30 percent off new purchases. You can find out more at go. me forward slash WP builds.

Hey. Hey. Hey. Hi there, Sabrina. How are you doing?

[00:01:00] Sabrina Zeidan: Hello. Hi, Nathan. And in good. How are you?

Yeah.

[00:01:04] Nathan Wrigley: Good. Good. Nice to have you back. We're, we're on the 6th, I believe, 6th episode of our speed it up show. Sabrina has joined us on Many, many previous occasions to talk about speeding up your well, any old site, really. It doesn't have to be a WordPress site. I guess WordPress fits the bill in many scenarios, but it doesn't have to be WordPress.

We don't really have a a particular agenda today. We didn't have a site that was submitted. So we can't share the screens and show one that has been submitted, but I might as well go through that and Explain how if you did wish to have Sabrina look at your website, it would be, possible for you to do that. So let me just share that experience. If you if you wanna do that, very simple. Head to this URL. It's pretty straightforward. Go to wpbuilds.com forward slash speed.

And over there is a form. It'll take you no more than a minute, maybe a couple of minutes to fill out, giving some basic details about, you know, what the website is and what you would like Sabrina to look at and whether or not you want her to get into the WordPress back end Or any of that kind of stuff. So wpbuilds.comforward/speed. If you're joining us today and you want to make some comments, I can see that there's, somebody's already done that. Mike. Hi there, Mike. Very nice to have you with us once again. If, like Mike, you want to make a comment, that's totally possible depending on where you are, depends upon how you're gonna manage that.

But, basically, the easiest place to go of all is to go to wpbuilds.comforward/live. Over there, you've got a couple of options. You can either be logged in to a Google account. YouTube, basically, is the comments. That's in the box to the right, but if you're on a mobile, it'll be underneath. Or if you look inside the video, top right of the video the other right, Nathan. If you look top right on the video, You'll see a little black box. I think it says live chat or something.

It's a bell button at the top. Click that, and you don't have to be logged into anything. You just type in your name and Type in your comments so you can do that. One other option is if you're on Facebook, then we need to have permission. And in order to do that, head to wave.videoforward/liveforward/facebook, and that will allow us to see Who you are? Okay. So, yes, please go share the stream. Wpbuilds.comforward/live. Alright, Sabrina.

I have builders. They are coming and going. I don't know whether they're gonna be here during this presentation or not. So there's a high chance that if they do show up and start banging things, it'll be very loud. So I will probably put my mic on mute at various different moments. If I do that and I fail to you know, if my mouth starts moving and no words come out, just say you're on mute, I'll I'll endeavor to come back in. So what's what's the plan today, Sabrina?

[00:04:05] Sabrina Zeidan: So the plan today, is not to look at someone's website because we don't have sadly one, but, the idea of today's topic came to me after the event event I was invited to to speak at, in the 2nd event, last week, we were talking about, WooCommerce backhand performance. And the host of this event, Alexander Salkovich, he worked many years in, hosting, in hosting companies? And what he said as an insider information, that's what I was always thinking, but he confirmed that at by his experience, 99% of people using hosting are not using resources that are paying for. They are overpaying for, what they need. They're paying what they for what they don't really need. And then there is this 1% of people Who desperately need more resources, but but they're not having them. And then there is a small small amount of people who have exactly what they need. And I'm thinking it would be good to talk today About how to, reduce costs for hosting.

Good. I like that. Yeah. Good.

Because usually when people ask, like, if you Google how to reduce costs for hosting, it will be an article, a blog post on some hosting provider comparing their plans to other hosting providers' plans and so on and so forth, but this is not really the answer this is not the answer, and we're going to talk about how to really shorten your budget on hosting? And for that, We'll start with, what usual hosting plan, includes and what you're paying for usually. So we won't be touching, like, how many domains name you can use and so on and so forth, only about resources. Usually, there are two basic things, 2 main things there. First thing is disk space that you are using, this Number 1. And another one, actual resources, CPU and memory, that you're using? Of course, there are a lot of a lot more technical details, in our trade and everything and so on and so forth. But usually when you compare plans, you can see how the plan price grows based on these resources. How many space you have? What is the amount of memory that you have? And how many server power you have. And we'll talk today how to reduce usage of, server resources and space because there are, cases often when you need more space and you buy, high tier because you need more space, but you're not using resources that you're having with it.

Maybe you can free up space somehow and save those money? Or vice versa, something force it something on your website is forcing you, to upgrade here because you need more resources And you keep upgrading and upgrading, and you're overpaying for things that you're not using except for that. This is the idea for today.

[00:08:06] Nathan Wrigley: Perfect. And it's that I I can totally sympathize with that because that kind of thing happens all the time. And especially, How to describe it? I think this is an area where you can be massively confused because if you're not really into the technology behind a website site and you don't understand what CPU is and all of that kind of stuff, I think it's really easy to to just be persuaded that you must upgrade.

You need.

Right. Because that just seems like the sensible thing. Well, something's wrong. I'm being I'm I'm being advised that maybe an upgrade would be the correct way to go, and perhaps that isn't always the The best way to go. So oh, great. Great idea, Sabrina. Loving it.

Okay.

[00:08:44] Sabrina Zeidan: I just you just mentioned, Nathan, that, when you don't really know what's going on, you can be persuaded. And I see this happening often, that website has a temporarily technical issue, a temporarily bottleneck. For example, server is crashing or database server is crashing? And hosting's hosting provider advice, in this case, often often just you don't you don't you just don't need enough resources. You need to upgrade. And they don't explain what does that mean? Often you do need to upgrade just to keep your website functioning, then you need, after you upgrade it, then you need to investigate what was causing the issue Right. Fix it, and downgrade. I had a client in February last year, on 14th February on day we're doing this work.

They had to, upgrade to the tier on WP engine that costs 3,000, $3,000 3,050 per month.

Wow. That's a lot.

[00:10:06] Nathan Wrigley: That's

[00:10:07] Sabrina Zeidan: really a lot.

Yeah. And, also, what are you what I'm just obliged to say that WP Engine, in that case, they were were understanding, they said, we will upgrade you for free for a month from your current plan to this plan? Their car their previous plan was high, very expensive as well, very expensive as well. But they upgraded to the next plan plan which is 3,000 for free for a month because we understand that you might need to, investigate what's happening and if you will be able to downgrade after, we will give you these months for free. That was very nice of them, But I don't really see this often. So and that client, they, had issues with their WooCommerce installation, and there was, because of the way how their custom theme was, coded, The usual WooCommerce website became very, very slow, and every action made on that website required a lot of resources from the server. That's why they needed to up to to upgrade. And we had these months To investigate and to fix, to find, and to fix what was the bottleneck. And, I just want to give to recommend a tool that, without which it wouldn't be possible to do.

We used New Relic for that, and I always recommend this tool to use. A lot of hosting providers provide, neural connection in the, hosting panels. But if, your certain Hosting provider doesn't provide. There are ways to install it, even without like, directly on the server. This is very cool tool. It basically, what it does, it shows in very, very small detail exactly what is happening, what's when someone is opening the page, when someone is clicking the the, link, for example, add to the cart. If someone clicked add to the cart, I can track down all the hooks, all the actions, everything that happened after that, action. And I'm able to see, how much time each and every action took, what each action fired, next because, you know, when you click add to the cart button, for example, it's not 1 action happening.

It's a bunch of actions happening, and then those that bunch of actions are calling other actions into into into the game. And, using Duralic, you can track what was happening, what was called, how much time it took, and where exactly, and for which users. Because, it's important to know, what the user, role and card And previous orders were for that case, for example, it was very tricky to investigate because the, slowness, this bottleneck happened on the website, not for all users. It was very hard to catch it. And without New Relic, I don't know I I really do not know how we would be doing this. It was hard to catch it because this bottleneck was happening only for users that were having a lot of previous orders in their account. It was a commerce website selling, downloadable products. And, with downloadable products, you don't want your users to pay 2nd time for the same product.

[00:14:23] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

And

[00:14:26] Sabrina Zeidan: there were users there that bought, before they bought, 1,000, 2,000, of Products. So whenever that user click add to the cart, add to cart button, There are a lot of checks happening if they have bought this product before so that if in case they bought this product before

Right.

Allowing them. And, I just jumped a little bit with the story because in need, that was hours our fix number 1, that's what we fixed. But initially it wasn't like that. Initially when the page was loaded, It's normal thing. When the page is loaded, it was checking if that users bought it before. And in case the user bought it before, the add to cart button wasn't available. And the tricky thing is also that 1 product had a lot of variations. So 1 page would be doing checks for each and every variation for this, customer to check if it's available for them.

And it wasn't a problem at all for most of the users, But that specific website, they had quite a few users who had 2,000 orders before?

That's

[00:15:57] Nathan Wrigley: a lot of checking. That is a lot of checking. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:16:00] Sabrina Zeidan: And also the theme was done in the wrong way. So it's already very have seen it. In WooCommerce, it's not done in a efficient way. And then there are those people who have loads of, downloads, order previous orders. And what WooCommerce does, it takes the database of all orders first. In each order of this user is taken it's taken the product, and then it compares the list of this product with the IDs that we have on this page? And, this, I understand this is not what is happening on each and every website. But to investigate, tricky cases like this, New Relic is the tool that I recommend.

So how does it actually give you that how did it

[00:16:55] Nathan Wrigley: give you that insight? Does it literally explain that to you? Is it it works that out on

[00:17:01] Sabrina Zeidan: It's it's a huge, huge table. Like, you can click down and down and down and go down through through the rabbit hole of each action. Yeah. So you can click the, page for exam you can open the page. If it wasn't private information, I would open it and show

[00:17:19] Nathan Wrigley: right now No.

It's fine. Fine. Fine. Fine. Fine. Don't do that. Yeah.

[00:17:24] Sabrina Zeidan: So, you can open let's see what was happening you can see there what was happening in the last 5 minutes. And then you have URLs with arguments in the query string. Yep. What was called exactly? You're clicking in that URL, and then you can see all actions that were happening on that URL, all actions. And then you can click on certain action, and you can see what that action, caused, what it called, what, what happened after that action happened?

Right.

And you can go down and down and down. It's like a huge, huge tree that you can go down to the levels. Right? And There is a lot of information there, but it's all in visual way, it's structurized nicely so you can identify, Okay. This is slow, this is slow, this is slow. Let's go down and check why it is slow. That's what it does.

[00:18:28] Nathan Wrigley: It's really incredible. That's a pretty impressive tool. I did actually share it on the screen, but I'll I'll share it one more time. So it's New Relic, It's newrelic.com, and we just had a little scan through the, the bits and pieces on the screen there. Okay. So that's great. Okay. Sorry.

Yep. Sorry to interrupt. Keep going.

Yeah.

[00:18:49] Sabrina Zeidan: So and I see that we have a, comment from Mike here. And I think we should start with this because I started with exciting things, but we can start with this actually, the difference between physical memory usage, disk usage, and file usage. By the way, if this is for anyone who is watching us right now, if you're watching us right now, please drop a line, say hi. We would be, pleased to know that you're watching and this is useful. Say hi to us. So, in in this case, in the case that I've just described, it was the question of, memory usage and, server, server CPU usage. And we had to upgrade for those resources.

We didn't need the disk usage. There were not, there was not growing number of files or backups or anything. That's what wasn't what we needed. We needed CPU and memory for that. And finishing the story about that client, we fixed that. And they went, from that $3,050 per month plan to $800 plan. I'm

Good

[00:20:17] Nathan Wrigley: job, Sabrina. You you earned your money, didn't you? That's great. You you made them very happy.

[00:20:23] Sabrina Zeidan: Yeah. Yeah, it was it was very rewarding, like, very cool case. So this was about resources usage. And the moral of this story is that if you have a certain spike, in your server resources usage, and your hosting provider is telling you that you need to upgrade your plan. This might be the case, that you need to upgrade your your plan, but it also might be needed only temporarily. If you when you upgrade your plan, try to investigate why that happened. Usually, if it's, if you didn't have any traffic spikes, if you didn't have anything changed much on your website. And, it might be not necessary for you to stick with higher tier.

It you might be able to discover processes that are causing this higher resources usage and downgrade back? This is the advice.

[00:21:38] Nathan Wrigley: That's good advice. It's certainly in the case that you mentioned. That that was really good advice.

Yeah.

[00:21:44] Sabrina Zeidan: Mhmm. Good thing about New Relic also because, So with that site, for example, they didn't have New Relic activated when I came in. But good thing with New Relic that once you activate it, It starts gathering information right away and depends on when your issue will happen. For us, it was it was about 11 hours before we saw what was happening there. Because as I said, it, only happened for certain users. And when it happened for those users, it was heading heading, down, all, like, it was stopping all processes. So 1 user with a lot of downloads requested certain action, and it was stopping, the entire pipeline for everyone

[00:22:43] Nathan Wrigley: else.

That's fine. One of those users to sort of come along and use the website. Yes. So in theory, that could have been Any amount of time. It could have been weeks Yep. Yep. Until somebody did that again. Okay.

But you got lucky. That's great.

[00:22:56] Sabrina Zeidan: Yeah. Mhmm. This was about, our, server resources. And just to add to that, in this case, it was related to first, it was 3 things. WooCommerce doesn't hand doesn't handle this specific part checking the availability of downloadable products. It doesn't do it in inefficient way. This was the first part contributed the 2nd part was the poorly, coded custom theme, and the third part was that that website got lucky to have clients who made that many orders to just have enough impact? So that's 3 the these 3, they kind of come together and yeah.

Well,

[00:23:49] Nathan Wrigley: you got lucky as well that they happen to be there when you Put New Relic on it because, yeah, that could have been, you might not have spotted anything, and then it would have looked like you You hadn't done your job or you didn't know exactly what was going on, so that's oh, well done.

[00:24:06] Sabrina Zeidan: Yeah. So for that side, it was these 3 things, but it can be something else. For example, it can be something happening, why cron events, scheduled events that are happening usually on your website. For example, making the most prominent example that I can think of is on the websites that have something posted on schedule. On on the news websites, for example, they, plan they are posting beforehand. And Sometimes before posting, they synchronize with something else.

They got

information from from somewhere else. Sometimes this happens in multisite and, like, the process of And and this is saved, for, as cronchop, a scheduled event. On my website, I have a if Someone who's watching us, for them, this is a case. I have a, article on my website, that is called, cron For multi site for for high loaded multi site networks.

Okay.

So if someone who's watching us has this problem, you can find some answers in that, article. How to make this scheduled events on multisites when, When this event requires a lot of resources, and it happens on regular basis, how to optimize it for performance? So

[00:25:50] Nathan Wrigley: Your website, by the way, just to be just, I guess, you you upload for that, it's sabrinazidandot Oh. Mhmm. Yeah. Okay. Great.

[00:25:58] Sabrina Zeidan: So it might be the there it might be one factor. It might be a combination of factors, that is slowing down your back end and causing you to upgrade to the higher, plan? I don't think I don't think that I have ever seen the website that would need something over $500 plan, if it's optimized well? Like, I think those sites exist. They do exist. But for most people who are paying something over that, it just means that your back end is not optimized well. That's why you are paying that

[00:26:50] Nathan Wrigley: watch?

Yeah. So that's that's a really good point as well because, obviously, every business wants to be agile and they want to be lean. And, you know, if you're in charge of a website and the bill is going bananas, listen to Sabrina's advice. It might be worth getting somebody like Sabrina in to take a look at it because it may be that you could save 1,000, potentially, of dollars a year Just by doing some remedial work and using tools like New Relic, like you just mentioned, yeah. Amazing. Amazing.

[00:27:23] Sabrina Zeidan: Here is you you just said hire someone like Sabrina, and I immediately had this idea what you can do yourself? Without even hiring someone, what you can do yourself to investigate, why is it so the easiest the easiest way to investigate what is what is happening is just to pick time, on your website when there are not a lot of, visitors there, nighttime, obviously, maybe 3 p 3 AM, 4 AM, wherever you're not sleeping. Just pick that time and do this basic recommendation. Switch to default theme, turn off your plugins and try enabling 1 by 1 and switch like first you disable all plug ins, then you switch to default theme. You are now on WordPress only. If the issue, still there, Well, you have the answer. It's not plug in. It's not seen. It's something inside WordPress install.

It's something that is happening Somewhere in WordPress install. Most likely, this something has nothing to do with WordPress install itself in this case Because, it might be someone, it might be some developer who put stuff where it shouldn't go? Mhmm. Because, 99 9% of cases, if you switch off, to default theme and deactivate all plug ins? You will see that your website is fast. If it's not happening, probably there is something is going wrong with your installation in general. Then if it's fine, try to activate your theme first, see how it changes, then activate plugins 1 by 1, see how it changes. And you will be able to, to understand what is adding to this slowness. While doing this, it's a good idea to have query monitor on, And you will see this. We we're talking about query monitor in our previous episode, by the way.

And you will see on screen the numbers showing you how many queries are made and how long this, how long, this page took to to, took to get loaded. And this way, without hiring anyone, without doing any any complicated moves, you might be able to figure out that this specific plug in that causes these bottlenecks, you might be able to, turn on everything back except of that plug in. And if this is true, this is the answer. This plug in slowing is slowing the website down. And then depending on the situation, if you can substitute it quickly and painlessly with something else, for example, you just use it use it for one thing, and you can substitute it easily. Probably, it makes sense just to substitute it with something else. If it's plug in that it's deeply incorporated into into your website, architecture and design and functionality, then you might need to take steps further. But this is the simplest, steps you can take to investigate where where the bottleneck is.

Query

[00:30:58] Nathan Wrigley: Monitor, by the way, is at querymonitor.com. It really is just a holding page for the link to the repo. They're, they're not trying to upsell you anything, But there you go. Querymonitor.com. We'll link I think that's a direct link straight yeah. There's a little download tab At the top, which takes you directly to wordpress.org where you can get it for free. Very cool.

Mhmm.

We have a couple of questions if you want to, want to take those. So thank you for those, Mike, for a start. So Nero says, So this is a question directed towards you, Sabrina. I don't know if you wanna deal with this one now or later, but it says, as well as your Client, do you feedback to plug in developers to help improve plug ins? So so that's asking you about work, really, which is nice. Do you do that

[00:31:48] Sabrina Zeidan: kind of thing?

Yeah. I do I do that, and I will explain when I don't do this. And when I do this, If I see that the plug in is just in general in general poorly written and It's not one single thing. I would probably not content developers. I would just I would just try to avoid that plug in by all means.

[00:32:21] Nathan Wrigley: But

Oh, I see. Yeah. I get what you mean. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

But,

[00:32:26] Sabrina Zeidan: if it's something that may maybe not done in a good way, but in general, plug in is fine. I almost sure will contact them and tell them, okay. Here is the situation that my client has. Here is, what we found out. Here is usually, I already would fix that by that time. Here is how we fixed it temporarily on our client's website. Here is how I I can suggest you to fix it. And in many cases it works, because if you come with someone With complaining about their work

Yeah.

And suggest solution to fix it. It's so much easier to fix it when you already have a solution. Because if you just complain that something and also if you provide detailed information for the team to replicate The problem. It would be so much faster to to fix this. I often do this with plugin developers who are related to anything, apps related, Anything for displaying ads and rotating and all that stuff? I would say that that niche of plug in developers, they are very, very responsive to such things. They are very quick to react. They are very responsive probably because the clients that, using their Plugins. They know exactly what they are missing on their revenue when something is not right Because those sites are making money with the content,

you know.

[00:34:23] Nathan Wrigley: That's a good point. So, yeah, in some situations in many situations, you will. And, obviously, By doing that, you help the rest of us out, because the plug in developers get to know the your thoughts. So that's nice to know. So thank you, Nero. And then we have a comment. I don't know who this is because, they it's anonymized, but it says great advice.

Would this would that mean it's your hosting? So I think probably that comment dropped At the point where you were talking about, disabling themes, accept the default theme, and disabling plugins, and then figuring out, okay. It's either WordPress at this point or its hosting. And I guess Hosting. Yeah. Yeah. If you if you put a new vanilla version of WordPress in And you know, for a fact that there's nothing weird going on because there's always the possibility that something has been hijacked in your, you know, security related. But, yeah, at that point,

it's

[00:35:15] Sabrina Zeidan: a hoax. This is very good question because I didn't describe that in a detail. So, you switched to default theme, you deactivated all plugins, and now you can see that with everything deactivated, your website is still slow. It might mean that it's something with your hosting, or it might mean that it's something with your WordPress install. And next step would be as Nathan just said, try to install Vanilla WordPress. If you have the opportunity to add another website on this very hosting panel, just install next to your existing one. Install new WordPress installation, absolutely new from scratch without anything. Try speed there.

If it's fast, it means something is wrong with installation Right. Not with the, with the hosting. I know that many people would advise just contact your hosting provider. I don't know. Maybe it's my bad luck, But I feel I just can't remember when I contacted hosting provider with the issue and it was quick and, painless to resolve because usually I contact hosting providers when I already know the issue, you? And I'm asking for example, I found out the issue. I know the issue. I know how to fix it, and I'm asking hosting provider. Okay, guys.

Here is the issue. Here is how I want to fix it, but I can't figure out on your exact, server or on your exact So hosting panel. I can't figure out how to do this. And I'm asking them very specific questions, and it takes a lot of time to answer. I cannot imagine, like, if you just tell them, my website is slow, what do I do?

[00:37:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. That's why you come in, Sabrina. That's Yeah. That's your role. That's why we have people like you.

[00:37:20] Sabrina Zeidan: That's that's right. Yeah. But, Yeah. Before that, you can go this through this process and just maybe maybe you are lucky and you will be able to to grow? What's what's slowing down your website on your own and quickly and painlessly?

Nice.

[00:37:42] Nathan Wrigley: You had another resource that you wanted to share as well, didn't you? Something that you had put together. I don't know if you wanna do that now. Or

[00:37:48] Sabrina Zeidan: Yeah. I sent you a link, and that was our 2nd part because we were talking about server sources, such as CPU and memory. But then there is often a situation when you have to upgrade to the high tier because you need more space on the server. You don't need more resources in terms of power, But you need more storage. And I've had quite a few clients that were upgrading end upgrading end upgrading continuously because their storage was growing, larger and larger and larger because of the nature of the websites that they that they had. So what to do in this case? If you need to constantly up grade because your storage space is running low and, like, every now and then. Mhmm. What to do? 1st thing that needs to be done is to identify if it's a bug or a feature.

So is it a coincidence? Like, is it the files that that you need and you really need them, and they are growing larger in size, and you just have no option but to keep them. I'll talk about how to keep them in 2 minutes. But before you decide that you need to keep all that that you have on your website, you need to figure out if this is what you really need. What can be a part of that growing space? The first, like, number 1, it's backups. You might be having back up from different providers without even knowing it and they might distort on your server. I saw a website, like, months ago. It had 3 backup system on their, hosting. A a hosting provider was making everyday backup, full backup, and then they had 2 plugins installed to make backups as well.

Oh, okay.

[00:40:16] Nathan Wrigley: Right?

Yeah. That's a lot of backups.

That's a lot of backups. But you know

[00:40:21] Sabrina Zeidan: but you know what is the funniest thing? Like, it's not only, 3 backups that are saved.

[00:40:31] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, I know what you're gonna say. They're backing up the backups. Yeah. Okay. So oh, it gets exponentially bigger. Every day it's worse. Oh, no. Good grief.

Because it's buried in the file structure of WordPress and that file hasn't been, I like this is not on a blacklist of don't back this up. So it's making a backup, then backing up WordPress, Plus the backup from yesterday. Oh, from yesterday. It does it. It's doing it, and then 2 more. 2

more.

[00:41:02] Sabrina Zeidan: Makes backup.

[00:41:05] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, oh, it's not funny, but it is quite funny.

It's not funny, but it's so funny.

But even a tiny, Teeny tiny WordPress website. Let that run for 3 days, 4 days, and suddenly you are You're into the gigabytes and gigabytes territory, aren't you? Wow. That you see, that's just burning through cash, isn't it?

Mhmm.

It's not good for the environment either because you're just sending bits all over the planet that have no reason to exist.

That's True.

Oh, okay. Sorry if I interrupted. That was a good story, though. I like that.

I just love

[00:41:45] Sabrina Zeidan: stories like

this?

Because this is so easy so easy to identify and fix. This is like you know, they had a huge problem that I come in. I fixed this huge problem in 20 minutes.

[00:41:59] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Well, it was it was a huge problem, but Yeah. It required one Click of a

button to Yeah. To make it go

away.

To to

to figure

[00:42:08] Sabrina Zeidan: out what's happening. This is so rare because, my daily job you know, Nathan, my day daily job is to speed up WordPress websites and to find bottlenecks. And, usually, I spent, like, 90% of my time to finding bottlenecks to figuring out what's going on, and then 10% of the time just on fixing it. It's easy when you know what you need to fix. And when things like this happen, this is so

[00:42:37] Nathan Wrigley: Such good days.

Yeah. You feel like a superhero because you just walk in and sort of say, oh, well, Dom. Yeah. Great. Here you go. Oh, that's great.

[00:42:51] Sabrina Zeidan: One example. Like, backups, it's so basic. It's, very easy to check. This can be one example why, your website is growing large. Another example. It's gonna be something might have gone wrong with the plug ins that you are using, like, in, in normal situation, they would be behaving one way. And in not normal situation, they might be behaving in a weird way. Mhmm.

And especially with the plugins that, supposed, that created to improve your performance? For example, plugins that create, page cache or create, for example, used, c s CSS bids or store something? Some things might have went wrong there. But to check that, it's easy as well. You're just checking what, directories in your on your server are taking place. You're investigating why they're taking this place, and this is it. So these cases are very easy to check. These, these cases easy to fix, because it's really bugs. It's really, things that needs to be fixed. Right? But then there are other cases when it's not a bug and it's stuff that you need It's stuff that you think you need to keep.

For example

Okay.

Your media. Yeah. You might be thinking that you need all that media, but in fact, you might be not needing it. And for example, basic example that would fit most of WordPress websites is when you so, when you upload any image to WordPress, WordPress would create thumbnails Which has a name that might be misleading for not native speakers as me, for example. Because in my, head thumbnails, it's small, small version of large image.

Mhmm. But

in WordPress thumbnail, it's any, version of original image.

Right. Right.

If you have, for example, 3 sizes set in your WordPress install and then you have WooCommerce that adds its own thumbnail size and then you have a couple of plugins that add their thumbnail size as well, you might find out that 1 single image that you uploaded to your WordPress leads to generation of 20 more images from each of different sizes For different, screen sizes and usage and so on and so forth, most likely, half or even more of those are not used.

[00:46:13] Nathan Wrigley: It's kinda weird in a way that that that isn't handled in core, that there isn't a way of Seeing all of that, stuff in core, if you know what I mean. Like, every time you create an image that there isn't some sort of check to say, do you want to Create all these other images, and I know that there's ways of doing that. But I always thought it was curious when I first found WordPress that that was going on. I didn't know that that was going on at the beginning, and it took somebody like you to tell me. And then I was like, okay. Right. Really? Every time. Alright.

Okay. And you heap on a lot of other plugins. Like you said, WooCommerce and various other, I don't know, image, compression plugins and things like that. Yeah. They'll make other different versions, and whether or not they get rid of the original one or just keep it just in case, there's a lot go and it it's especially images, it's Megabytes and megabytes often. Yeah. Anyway, sorry I interrupted.

[00:47:09] Sabrina Zeidan: You know, I'm thinking about you said that wouldn't it be nice to have this information when you're uploading an image. Probably, it would be nice to have it listed that

[00:47:19] Nathan Wrigley: That's what I mean. Just Showing you.

Yeah. Yeah.

[00:47:23] Sabrina Zeidan: Like, this, action will generate 25 more images, just so you know.

Right. Exactly. Yeah.

Up to you to take any action on this or not. Yeah. Yep.

[00:47:37] Nathan Wrigley: Can we please

I bet there's I bet there's something somewhere already out there in the wild that does explain exactly that as you're doing some little nice Nice feature plug in somewhere, but, yeah. Anyway, sorry. Interrupted. So okay. Images can be responsible.

[00:47:53] Sabrina Zeidan: Nathan, you know what's the problem with performance is that such plug in that would, you install plug in that would tell you this, But if you installed plug in for this, you are not the one who needs to be told about

[00:48:06] Nathan Wrigley: this.

Yeah. Yeah. You know that it's a thing.

[00:48:12] Sabrina Zeidan: If you can't to to to you know about this thing. But I think this is really a good idea to have this in the core.

[00:48:18] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. I'm I'm I'm saying it. It should be in core. Alright.

[00:48:24] Sabrina Zeidan: Yeah. So this is one, this is one source of our growing, file database, versions of images. Also, if you're installing, as you mentioned, a compression plug in, It might be generating WebP version for you, and it will be generating WebP version for every version of the image that you had. So you uploaded image and it's like

[00:48:48] Nathan Wrigley: backups from a minute ago. You create 1 image. All of a sudden you've got 25 from 1. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's gotta go somewhere.

It's

[00:48:56] Sabrina Zeidan: fractal. Right? Cauliflower is fractal.

I

[00:49:00] Nathan Wrigley: think there's a lot of clever work being done by people like Cloudflare to, to render images on the edge And

Right.

You know, they just serve up exactly what you need more or less at the moment you

need it.

[00:49:14] Sabrina Zeidan: Exactly. So for this case, what you can do, you can no. Before, I wanted to say that you you can first offload your images somewhere so it doesn't take the place on your server

Yep.

Or use Cloudflare or, Cloudinary or anything else to do that. But the fact the the the problem is that even if you offload it somewhere there are tons of images that has already been created. You won't get treat of that. The link that I sent to you before, Nathan, if you can have it on the screen, this

is

the link to the post on my website, how to delete unused to everything, attachments, media, everything, that you need to delete on your website. There are a few cases I described there. Maybe that one of the cases, would fit your, situation? This is for someone who is watching us. So this is the 2nd the the the the 2nd the 2nd most, popular space eating, issue on the website that images that you really need are created in multiply, in multiple Multiple versions and they're eating up the server not not server, but disk space Uh-huh. On your, hosting plan. But also, there can be another situation and I have this example. I'm doing this right now for, for a client. It can be another situation with news websites, for example.

Imagine and use websites with, 100 100000 of posts of news, right, that are already there. Most of those news are not relevant anymore.

Yeah.

You need but some posts and some news still have traffic because news websites, they're making money on traffic. So for this case, if and, every single news new sorry. News? Every single post with news.

Okay. I'll do that. Yeah.

Every single post has its own images. Right? So there are, 100 of 1,000 pause on your news portal that are eating up space. What can you do in this situation? I'm working for the client on this right now. In this situation, you can get rid of what is not bringing you money. You can delete posts that are not bringing any traffic anymore, any are not bringing any revenue anymore. No one is visiting them. For that for this case, for example, what I'm doing, I'm grabbing information from Google Analytics, And I'm looking at the last 60 days. If there were no visit to the certain URL, I have this URL saved, in a separate place or in text file.

Okay.

And after that? And this is done on Kron every day. And, after it's saved there, Then another task will grab that files that file with the list of URLs that no one has visited For the last 60 days, and they're absolutely useless on our website. They're not bringing us anything, but they're just they're just eating space and resources From our Horsesh press. And another script will take the list of these URLs, delete the post, and delete the media. Not only attachments, but also delete the media related to that post. And this way, the database, the server space, the server resources, they can be kept Lean. They can be kept, in a good shape even for large websites, juice websites with a database that is supposed to be huge? It's 4 minutes

[00:53:55] Nathan Wrigley: too far.

I know. I was just looking at the time thinking, what the heck? How did that happen again? Like, a whole hour went. But, just about your point, the the that was a really interesting solution, by the way. So poll the website For a month, if something's not being used, classify it as it's worthy of being in a deleted state or a draft state. Then If that continues to be the case, after a month, delete it, but also find the the media that was attached to that and delete that as well. I guess I guess there's some scenarios where you don't want that to happen. Obviously, if you're, like, you know, if they're saying you you are a news do

it on my website.

Yeah. So like a news site or something. Yeah. It might be important to keep that record. You know, if you if you're the only news source in the area where you live, it might be really useful To have that for posterity, you know, in the same way that we still look at manuscripts from 1000 of years ago because it's interesting. But but if you're not, if you've just got Content which is here today, gone tomorrow, that's a really useful idea. That's such a great idea. So search for things which are not being used, make them deleted, And at the same time, delete the media that is that is attached to it.

Just a couple of things that have come in. Firstly, Mike is saying He's just checked the physical memory usage of, I guess, a site. I don't know if it's his own site or what have you. And it's peaking at a 100%. He's worried. So you know where to go, don't you? Mike, you can go to you can go to sabrina.com And, reach out to Sabrina. You never know. She might be able to, to get something on going with you.

But also, what else have we got? So oh, Henriette, said, can we have the link in the chat? So I did that. Hopefully, you found oh, you did. You did found it because I posted the link, And then, that was the one on your website. And then thank you. And then Cammy. Cammy. Cammy Cammy McNamara? McNamara. Yeah.

And, saying she's enjoying it so much. Great. That's great. We are gonna have to, as we say in the UK, knock it on the head Because I I have to disappear in about 10 minutes and go off and do things with my family this evening. So, I guess it only remains for me to say, Firstly, thank you so much, Sabrina. As always, a really interesting chat. Really interesting. I'm just gonna put the URL for the the submission of your site because if you are watching this at some point, not when it's live, and you missed this bit, please go and submit your site.

Wpbuilds.comforward/speed. There's a quick form, 2 minutes, 3 minutes, Less. A minute depending on how quick you are at typing. Go and fill that form out. And you never know, Sabrina might be looking at your website The next time we do this. Is there anything else you wanted to add, Sabrina, before we

[00:56:51] Sabrina Zeidan: And next time we are doing this. It's next Thursday. This very same time. We would love to have some websites submitted. You see how nice we are. We're not going to say anything bad about your website. We'll just try to identify bottlenecks and help you out.

[00:57:10] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. You're at least you're nice. I can't speak for myself, but I you're you're nice. So that's good. 50% of the combination is very nice. Well, I appreciate it. Thank you, Sabrina. We'll be back this time next week.

So it'll be 3 PM UK time. Wherever that is where you are in the world, you can figure that out, I'm sure, atwpbuilds.comforward/live. So we will we will end it there. Thank you so much, Sabrina, for joining us today. Really appreciate

[00:57:37] Sabrina Zeidan: it.

Thank you everyone who joined. Bye.

Bye bye.