Dreamhost was sending me cryptic emails about my site using too many resources then dieing as a result.

Then Jetpack site monitoring was finding the site down, presumably due to running out of resources.

And the homepage loaded too slowly.

So a technical problem was at hand.

There aren’t a lot of resources out there for troubleshooting this sort of issue. GoDaddy has a long abandoned plugin that would tell you which WordPress plugins were using the most RAM. It no longer worked. The current state of site troubleshooting is to disable your plug-ins one at a time, and use another plugin to monitor site RAM usage. I found it better to start with a list of plugins known to cause excessive resource usage, and then run a speedtest at gtmetrix.com.

So I said goodbye to some plugins. The one I’ll miss the most is one that posted related posts on if you viewed a post from the single post page. Plugins like that are designed to keep eyeballs on that page. I also disabled the Better Tag cloud plugin. I liked it there in the sidebar. Tags are better than categories in my opinion. But Tag Clouds are really a think of the past. So is blogging for that matter. Yet here I am.

Jetpack is frequently a target for people trying to save resources. After reviewing the features I used, I decided to disable it.

The main thing slowing down my page, was the embedded Youtube videos. I installed WP Youtube Lyte, a plugin that now displays a screenshot of the video rather than embedding the actual video. When you click on the screen, then the video loads. If you’re on mobile, you’ll need to click twice. If you’re in a RSS reader, you’ll need to click the view on Youtube link.

Lastly, I made some changes to caching at Cloudflare following the cloudflare site settings listed in an article on W3 Total Cache and Cloudflare. I did not install W3 Total Cache. I’ll have to keep an eye on it to see if I’ve successfully enabled caching without delaying when people see my content.

When I started the front page of InfosecBlog.org was loading in 3 to 4 seconds according to gtmetrix. Its now loading in 0.6 to 1 second.

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