Common causes of a slow website

There are a wide range of things that can affect the resource usage of your account, and while you can monitor your CPU usage in cPanel, it's important to understand some of the possible underlying causes, to prevent them from happening in the first place.

Below are some of the top 10 causes of heavy resource usage on an account that could potentially lead to an account suspension if not taken care of:

No database caching

If you're utilizing any web software that relies on a MySQL database back-end, typically you'd want to look for a plugin or a way to leverage database caching. This way if you have 10 visitors to your website, all requesting the same information, the server doesn't have to pull identical data from the database 10 times. But rather just once, and then serve up that cached version to the next 9 visitors requesting the same thing.

Robots and search engine crawlers

A lot of website traffic can be generated by various bots or crawlers sent from search engines to index your website. You can use a robots.txt file to control how these bots are allowed to crawl your website if they are causing usage problems.

Website is coded inefficiently

If you website has been coded in a server-side language such as PHP, this means that the server has to run a script each time that a visitor comes to your website.

By reducing the need for dynamic scripts to run, and instead serving up more static HTML content, your website could run much more efficiently and utilize the available server resources much better.

IMAP activity

When you store email on the server and then check it via an IMAP client, this can become intensive if you store a lot of mail in the same folder. You can follow our guide on how to prevent excessive IMAP activity to stop this from happening.

Excessive amount of plugins

If you're using a CMS (Content Management System) like WordPress, Joomla, or Drupal, if you have a large number of active plugins that you're using this can add to the resource usage required from the server for each and every page view. Reducing the amount of plugins you have running at once can help reduce usage a lot typically.

Large surges in website traffic

Even if your website if properly optimized to run efficiently, in certain cases you can have such a large surge in website traffic all at once that this begins to exhaust a server's physical resources. If you are expecting a large volume of traffic in one day, it can be important to try to strip your website down to its most bare essentials, so that the website can continue to run, even while receiving larger than normal levels of traffic.

Unattended forums

If you have an online forum that you don't check on a frequent basis this would be considered an unattended forum. A lot of times spammers will utilize these to posts all sorts of spam related content, then when that content is viewed by others it can drive up the resource usage of your account.

Excessive spam comments

If you do not consistently stay on to of, and remove spam comments from your website this could potentially start leading to a large amount of resource usage as the server attempts to pull up all of those comments from your database each time the website is viewed.

Intensive image manipulation

A server is mainly built for quick server to client type requests, such as serving up a webpage or image. However in some cases software will also task a server with doing more desktop related activities such as resizing an image. These are fine in small quantities, but the usage required can quickly cause problems if it's getting called a lot.

Intensive cron jobs

If you have automated cron jobs setup to run a script on a set interval, sometimes having the script run too frequently can lead to resource usage issues.