Wordpress - Live site SUPER slow, exact clone on Staging/subdomain just fine

Question

My main site - emerynails.co.uk - is loading super slow all over the front end and the backend. Takes anywhere from 8 to 20 seconds to fully load a page (not based on testing tools, this is the actual expereince I'm referencing).

So to try and diagnose the issue, I cloned the site to a subfolder, put it on a subdomain, same server, same public_html directory....but it seems to work just fine, front and back end: stage2.emerynails.co.uk

I don't know what in the world could be the difference. It's literally the exact same site, same server (GoDaddy on Launch plan/cPanel), all the plugin sare the same, active, updated etc - but the live domain is just incredibly slow. Staging not so much.

I can't see any excessive resource usage or anything that would be the culprit, looking at the Network tab in chrome tools just shows the "root" as loading slow...but I don't know what to do with that.

I don't know what causes "Waiting for server response" to be that long - I would assume just a hosting/server issue, but if so, I'd expect everything I put on this server to be slow also. What typically causes or can cause that if not the hosting server itself?

Any ideas of what to test or look for much appreciated...

Thanks!

Answer 1

I had the same issue with Godaddy. Even went as far as setting up my own web server to prove them wrong. Their servers are a bit hit-and-miss.

Moving to Cloudways solved it initially for me. However, after moving to WPX last week, I went from a 60-70 page speed with ads to 98 on mobile, with ads.

WPX can solve any speed issues you might have, included in the subscription.

Not trying to sell you WPX or anything else. Just saying, Godaddy has issues and they don't want to admit or fix them.