PHP and Wordpress Memory Suggestions to Speed up Slow Website

Question

cry for help here... need help with actual memory limits for PHP and Wordpress - am I using too much? My Wordpress is so slow I am about to give up...

I know how to increase php and Wordpress memory so that's not the topic but I need help with actual memory limits - I tried many variations and my Wordpress site at first runs quickly but after few hours it just barely loading... I tried to bump up to a larger instance in Lightsail (4 times more memory, 4x cpu) - that didn't make any difference and my smaller instance seem to run faster, something tells me I am having memory allocation issues...

here's my settings : My Setup: Lightsail 512M, Aurora RDS, PHP 7.2.13, Apache, WordPress 5.2.

Lightsail instance comes with 512M of memory so I allocated it as follows:

PHP: 512M - am I crazy allocating all server memory to PHP, should I leave some for XYZ, if so for what?

Wordpress Max (admin) 256M - good or too much?

Wordpress Front end: 128M - my best guess this is ok.

I have about 85 plugins that I tried to deactivate/activate and of course deactivating all of them solves the problem but wonder what else I can/should do to speed my site up.

Any help is appreciated!

Answer 1

First of all 85 plugins is A TON of plugins and that will greatly slow your site down. When I do development most at most I like to have 5 tops. Also not knowing what theme you are on, how the theme has been written can slow the site down as well. Clean code = fast site.

If you can't consolidate the plugins you should look into caching the site if there wont be a lot of changes on it. Depending on your hosting, some hosts for Wordpress like Flywheel and WP Engine have the ability to turn on caching in your admin panel.

If your hosting doesn't allow this there are......sigh......plugins to do so. But again 85 plugins are way too many. With all the calls they are going to make making the site run fast is going to be pretty impossible.