Have you noticed your WordPress Admin section slowing down recently? While not devastating since you can still perform all the desired actions, it’s undoubtedly annoying to experience a delay when navigating the wide variety of sections inside. It can also be frustrating if something is time-dependent, such as publishing posts, starting maintenance, making web design changes, or responding to comments. Therefore, it’s pivotal that you act quickly and efficiently to fix the issue when the WordPress admin dashboard is slow.
1. Change your web hosting provider to remove slowness
We know this option sounds like a no-brainer, but sometimes your current hosting plan doesn’t cut it. You can only take improvements so far if the foundation is shaky and performs underwhelmingly. We already explained what web hosting is and what the different types of web hosting are. Therefore, you should choose a high-quality service provider and choose a more expensive plan. A huge improvement is getting a server that doesn’t host many websites, while the ideal one is getting a dedicated server for yours.
2. Update WordPress to fix a slow Admin Dashboard performance
Though WordPress is user-friendly and straightforward to administrate by default, rookie mistakes, laziness, and lack of knowledge can truly affect the back-end and front-end performance alike. WordPress developers across the globe work hard to make the CMS (Content Management System) easy to use, safe, effective, and versatile. But besides fixing bugs in code and introducing new features, newer versions of WordPress usually bring performance improvements compared to the previous one. Taking a look at the announcement of WordPress 6.0 Arturo illustrates our point. It’s another milestone version whose tweaks contribute toward a boost in loading speed for the WordPress Admin section. We have a guide for updating WordPress ready.
3. Use the newest stable PHP version for WordPress
Upgrading to the most recent version of PHP can make a big difference. If you’re one of the owners that never paid attention, we also demonstrated how to know the current PHP version. That is because WordPress is powered by PHP, and using an outdated version can spell trouble if you updated your theme and plugins. The opposite can also be true—upgrading to a version of PHP that your plugins and the active theme are incompatible with (yet) can also cause performance issues. Therefore, double-check the compatibility and have a backup ready to go.
Expand the PHP memory limit (Optional)
You can increase the 32 MB memory limit for PHP configured by default if you wish. The default number may be sufficient for small blogs but cannot handle websites that run processes concurrently, for example, online stores or eCommerce. You can do so by adding the define(‘WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ‘X’); code to your wp-config.php file after accessing the website via FTP. For instance, if you want it to be 256 MB, replace X with 256. Some web hosting providers forbid you from doing this but may do it for you.
4. Configure the number of WordPress Screen Options items
Sometimes there’s too much information the page in WordPress Admin has to load, leading to slow rendering or hang-ups, prompting a quick fix. An easy solution is to limit the number of dashboard information like this:
- Open a page on the back-end, such as Posts -> All Posts or Pages -> All Pages.
- Click on Screen Options in the top right corner.
- Remove checkmarks from built-in options or those added by plugins you don’t want to see on the page. You can also limit the number of posts or pages on a single page from the default value of 20 under “Pagination”. Also, try switching to Compact view under “View mode”.
5. Turn off Heartbeat configuration, configure revision limits and autosave period
WordPress’ Heartbeat API (Application Programming Interface) can affect your Admin section performance negatively. If you’re unaware, it’s responsible for notifications such as when a user is editing a post or when updates to plugins and themes are available. Further, WordPress is configured to autosave changes every minute and those revisions can add up to quite a bulk on performance. Here’s how we would solve these problems:
You can install a plugin such as Heartbeat Control by WP Rocket or enter this code at the bottom of your functions.php file:
add_action( ‘init’, ‘stop_heartbeat’, 1 );
function stop_heartbeat() {
wp_deregister_script(‘heartbeat’);
}
As for posts and autosaving, the easiest way is to add these two codes to your wp-config.php file in the root folder after gaining FTP WordPress website access. If they exist, modify the number:
define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', 5);
define('AUTOSAVE_INTERVAL', 300); // time is in seconds
This will make it so that only 5 post revisions will be saved at any one time, and that WordPress autosaves posts every 5 minutes. You can even disable WordPress post revisions altogether.
6. Find the culprit by monitoring website query logs
If you’re unsure where the performance consumption is coming from, a handy free plugin, Query Monitor by John Blackbourn, can help. Only admins can see its output, pointing to plugins, themes, core files, and any problematic queries that hog your CPU, RAM, and ultimately, page loading in the Admin section. You can then seek alternatives, erase resource-hungry plugins, disable or delete unused themes, and so much more.
7. Clean the WordPress database bloat
WordPress constantly communicates with the database to access crucial information. However, over time, excess data starts to build up, bloating your website unnecessarily. A well-known free solution to this problem is to install Advanced Database Cleaner by Younes JFR. Not only can you eradicate unused revisions, drafts, unwanted comments, trackbacks, pinbacks, and much more, but also schedule a cleaning. We propose creating a backup of your site beforehand, however.
8. Install a WordPress caching plugin and clear the cache
Are you using any leading caching plugins for WordPress? If so, when was the last time you cleared WordPress cache, and erased cache from, say, WP Rocket (or the caching plugin you use)? If the answer was no, you should get one, since it’s a killer way to boost website speed. However, you should try to turn off link preloading (or configure a cron job to preload outside of peak traffic hours) and raise the cache lifespan and crawl interval.
9. Employ a CDN (Content Delivery Network)
Check our explanation of technique #3 in the speed-boosting guide for another fix for a slow WordPress Admin dashboard. Using a CDN will offload bandwidth and CPU usage, optimize your images, switch to their DNS (Domain Name System) server, serve content from various locations, and enhance your cache/hit ratio. It siphons significant performance demands from your server to their data centers.