No, We’re not selling the house. Or leaving the leafy, muggy idyll of the Baltimore suburbs. I’m talking about webhosting, specifically the hosting of this particular website, which has become slower than the Chinese traffic jam lately. Simple HTML requests are fast enough, but serving any kind of PHP from WordPress can be measured in minutes, which is unacceptable. The tentative plan goes something like this:

1. Get the caching situation sorted out – Done. Does anybody see a difference in load times? I do.
2. Switch out the template for a little while to see if there’s something there that’s slowing things down.
3. Look through the template to see if there’s anything in the code that’s slowing things down—a rogue plugin, greedy PHP call, or flaky image request.
4. Optimize the database to see if that’s the issue.
5. Set up a mirror over on my other site, load the database, and see if it’s any faster over there (meaning the DB server here is just slow or overloaded).