3rd party Wordpress Consultation

[c8471912]

Hello all,

We recently employed an Upwork freelancer to recreate our website. They did a great job but it loads incredibly slow. The host company says it’s the website design and the freelancer says the host is at fault.

Upwork says they will not provide consultation or opinion on a freelancers work.

We now to turn to this great community to help. If you have an opinion on what is wrong and what we could do to fix it, please respond.$$$

Happy fishing!!

**Edited for Community Guidelines**

[1stfold]

Hi Taylor,

Can you please share the url of your website? I can try to review the website and can give you my opinion on it.

Thanks
Aamir

[prestonhunter]

re: "We recently employed an Upwork freelancer to recreate our [Wordpress] website. They did a great job but it loads incredibly slow."

That is correct.

re: "The host company says it’s the website design and the freelancer says the host is at fault."

The host company is correct. It is the freelancer's fault.

re: "Upwork says they will not provide consultation or opinion on a freelancers work."

That is correct. That is not a service that Upwork provides. Nowhere in Upwork's documentation or advertisements do they claim to provide that kind of service.

HOWEVER: You may hire consultants on the main Upwork.com website.

re: "We now to turn to this great community to help. If you have an opinion on what is wrong and what we could do to fix it, please respond."

The freelancer you hired used WordPress, and he did so to the best of his ability. WordPress is optimized for ease of use and is intended to be something that allows users to combine various nice-looking components in ways that actually function. WordPress is NOT optimized for speed. That is something that is very important to understand.

There are more advanced WordPress developers who have a better understanding of how to improve system speed, such as by using custom code or alternative plugins. But no matter what they do, they will still be using a framework which is:

- optimized for ease of use

- NOT optimized for speed

If you want to optimize page load speed, then you willl choose from these options

- NOT use WordPress

- Use WordPress as a way to design front-end presentation, but not back-end processing; the back-end processing, database, SQL queries, application source code, etc., will be all custom-created, and NOT come from off-the-shelf WordPress tools

- Use WordPress with custom-created plug-ins and/or with speed-optimized plug-ins which are created and integrated by an experienced, high-level WordPress specialist

[loren_rosen]

An additional option would be to throw hardware at the problem, that is, upgrade your service level with your host. Would take some guesswork to decide if this would be cost-effective.

[yitwail]

I’ll expand a bit on what Preston and Loren wrote. WordPress is not inherently slow and hosting can make a difference. (If it was always “incredibly slow”, it wouldn’t be the most widely used CMS in existence.) For instance, GoDaddy basic hosting will be slower than wpengine, but wpengine costs more. Also, choice of theme and plugins can have a big performance impact. A themeforest theme with a zillion features will be slower than a custom theme that only has needed features. Even the database issues Preston mentioned can be alleviated to some extent by regularly optimizing the database and deleting excess page revisions. But if the site has a large number of pages, like several hundred, then WordPress would probably not be the best choice. And speed has to be traded off against convenience and cost, unless you have a limitless budget.