A few months ago my website started having problems with loading times. It’s split into 3 main parts; the static main page, a TNG Genealogy page attached to a database, and a photo gallery running on Backlight6. Currently hosting on NetworkSolutions and trying to narrow down the culprit.
The static main page always loads fast and fine.
In the backlight part of the site, most galleries load the cover image quickly and populate, but the background and mastheads take up to 30 seconds to load. Using the inspector in the browser, it appears that
…backlight/?m=publisher&c=gallery&a=javascript&p1=scripts&p2=33
is the one taking a long time to finish. Replace p2=33 with p2=### for any given page and you have the same query/url and the same slowdown.
The third part of the site runs a simple page for TNG accessing a database. This started having trouble a few months ago where an invalid query to the database returned instantly, but any valid query timed out. I thought this was due to massive bot activity, and have since set up cloudflare to cut them out.
I have now copied the files and ran on a localhost using XAMPP, and everything on localhost appears relatively quick. Unfortunately the css files don’t seem to work in that environment, either because I set something up wrong, or backlight just isn’t built for that, so I haven’t been able to test the stylesheets in another environment. Meanwhile the galleries all load fine in the localhost environment, and pretty quickly compared to the live site.
I’m wondering if there’s a way to check if the stylesheets are using a large amount of server load or if something unrelated to backlight6 is causing the slowness problem. There’ve been a lot of other small things on the way that have needed fixes, but none seem to have been the cause of the slow load times.
Any tips, advice, or help would be much appreciated.
Network Solutions was the problem, things work many times faster on a new host.
Hopefully the other few minor problems I’ve been having will be solved by transferring.