People visiting this site may have noticed that it was loading slower than a molasses popsicle.1 I’ve been aware of the problem, but I hadn’t had much luck tracking it down, despite a couple of tickets open to my hosting provider. I was just about to do the whole “Disable every single plugin and add them back one by one” routine when they sent me a note that ultimately provided the ultimate clue.
They showed me a load report which indicated that the slowdown appeared, in part, to be related to content that was utilising Google Fastpages.2 The only problem was that I didn’t recall installing anything that made reference to that, so I started going through all my installed plugins to see if one of them tied into that service. Coming up empty, I started searching the web, and discovered that this wasn’t actually a WordPress plugin, but rather an option in my hosting provider’s customer platform. I had apparently turned it on3
Once I turned this option off, my page load times dropped from 5-9 seconds to around 600ms. That’s MUCH better.