Site SLoooooW, Wordpress template issue?

[freehits]

OK, I maintain this site for some folks.

LINK will return shortly

Link purposely broken for now while i do some testing........

This is a hacked and jacked (seo steroids) wordpress design.

About 14 days ago it become super slow to open any page.

I complained to the host and he sid he tested the server and it was running fast.
I have other sites running on the same server (shared) and they are not slow, so its the site.

After about 3 days it become normal again, pretty fast loading pages.

This lasted till about 5 days ago, then and now it is super slow again.

Here is the process of elimination I have followed.

I changed templates and the default templates work super fast.
So its in the template layout code.

I Blanked out the CSS file, and it was still slow.
So its not the css.

I moved the template to another WORDPRESS BLOG I have on the same shared server, that has only about 20 posts in it. It was slow there too.

So its in the template and not the database.

It worked for months, then slow for 3 days, then worked for 5, then slow again now.

So its not the html code itself, as that never changed (so the go validate responses are a waste of time).

I deactivated all the plugins and it was still slow, so not the plugins?

I installed FIREBUG for firefox and YSLOW addon by yahoo, but that shows only page elements loading times and such, and all seem ok.

again pointing at php, but the wordpress php is first rate and never had a problem before.

It has to be something in this template that is not in the default templates, perhaps evenm some php I added? How to see what element of the processing page is slowing it down so bad?


ANYTHING I MISSED? My traffic is down 90% from the slow loads, and google news wont touch it when its this slow.

[studiokraft]

Have you included any external scripts in the template? Google Analytics? Affiliate advertising of some sort?

I had Google Maps on a landing page that we designed for one client, and it had a noticeable performance hit.

[ashukairy]

oh, that's brutal! I'm not sure if the template is an issue though...I'll get back to you on this one if nobody else comes up with a solution.

[bj]

I hope my suggestion is wrong. Did you add something in php to the template that is capable of being injected? It sounds like a periodic hijack.

[neatten]

It was definitely template issue. Judging from the situation, you probably have http request problem. It may be used to call for plugins though. My recommendation, reduce the http latency as much as possible.

I have a post pertaining this issue which can be read at Make WordPress Loads Faster.