Over the years we’ve added and removed (mostly added) lots of material from our website. Over time, things have gotten slower, and slower, and s…l…o….w….e….r. It has become quite depressing and frustrating. I’ve upgraded our hosting over and over, spending ever more money on faster processing but no matter what I did it didn’t seem to get any better.
Just recently, it was time to renew our hosting and I called our host, GoDaddy. They once again decided that I needed to upgrade to a new hosting platform and once again I said ok. But this time, rather than some back end witchery they supposedly did after charging me more money, I was being moved to an entirely new server. This required moving the site lock, stock, and barrel.
I don’t know how you go about moving, but when I pack up and move, the first thing I do is figure, “What the heck can I get rid of and not have to move.” Maybe that analogy doesn’t work on websites, but it is the way I think. If we are going to new hosting, lets go with new stuff, and by new I mean “less of.”
I’ve blown away everything from our site that isn’t part of the core site. Mainly that means WordPress plugins since they seem to be the major culprits in most performance issues. That means we lost our recipe page (an orphaned plugin that is no longer being updated) and a myriad of other things like our author auto signature (there is only one author anymore) and other things like that.
The result of all this is you should be able to time the loading of our site on something more timely than a sun dial. We may creep in with some new goodies over time, but right now if I can just get the pages we have updated and working that would be a win.
This move has been weeks in the making so even though you don’t see a lot of new content, there was quite a bit of back end work to get to this point. I hope you enjoy the faster speed.