Your shop is slow: when it is the shop and when it is the server

A customer writes to say the site is slow. You open it, it takes five seconds, and something inside you says a module must be to blame. So on Sunday afternoon you start uninstalling things blindly, hoping to get lucky.

That afternoon almost never fixes anything, because «it is slow» is really two different problems, and only one of them is solved by touching the shop.

The two things people call «slowness»

Picture a restaurant. There is the time from ordering until the kitchen sends the dish out, and there is the time from the dish leaving the kitchen until it reaches your table and you can start eating.

An online shop works the same way:

• The kitchen is the server: it takes the request, queries the database, builds the page and hands it over.
• The waiter is your customer's browser: it downloads images, fonts and scripts and paints them on screen.

If the kitchen takes three seconds to even start plating, it does not matter how fast the waiter runs. And that is where most Sunday afternoons go: rearranging the table decoration when the problem is at the stove.

How to tell which one it is, in two minutes

You do not need any exotic tool. Four checks you can do yourself:

1. Go into your admin panel. If the panel drags too —and there are no big photos, no banners, no marketing scripts in there— the problem is underneath, in the machine.
2. Try it at eleven in the morning and at eight in the evening. If it flies at midday and clogs up at night, you are sharing a kitchen with a lot of people.
3. Load the same page twice in a row. If the first takes forever and the second is fine, it is a caching matter: your shop is cooking every dish from scratch.
4. Check how heavy a product page is. If a single photo weighs four megabytes, there is your waiter loaded up to the eyebrows — and that one does get fixed in the shop.

If the admin panel is slow, stop looking for modules to uninstall: the bottleneck is the server.

What we usually find underneath

After a fair few rescues, the list repeats itself:

• «Unlimited» hosting that is not. Shared plans cap processes and memory per account; when your shop asks for more it does not fail, it waits. And that wait is your site taking its time.
• An old PHP version. Moving from an old release to the current one, touching nothing else, usually halves the time it takes to build a page.
• The server redoing the same work a million times, because nobody switched on the cache that keeps the work already done.
• A database nobody has swept in four years: millions of log rows, abandoned carts from 2021, statistics no one looks at any more.
• The backup running at seven in the evening. That is, the heaviest process of the day right in your best selling hour.
• Images straight out of the camera, four or five megabytes each, which mobile visitors download in full.

None of that is fixed by uninstalling modules, and all of it is fixed in a morning by somebody who knows where to look.

What we do when we run the server

We administer the servers our clients' shops live on. It is not just «renting a machine»: it is making sure the machine is properly sized, up to date and watched.

• Sizing it for your actual shop, not for the plan with the best margin: how many products, how much traffic, how many orders at peak hour.
• Keeping it current: PHP version, extensions, database and security patches, without the shop falling over on update day.
• Caching where it belongs, so the server does not rebuild every page from scratch, and images served light and in modern formats.
• Scheduled database maintenance, with the heavy jobs at night, never during your selling hours.
• Monitoring with alerts: we find out something is wrong before your customer writes to you.
• Backups that get restored, not just taken. A backup nobody has tried to restore is not a backup, it is a folder.

And no strange strings attached: the server and the domains are yours, with your credentials. If one day you want to take it elsewhere, you take it.

What you notice when it is set up properly

First, in daily work: the panel stops dragging, uploading a hundred products stops being a lost afternoon, and order emails go out when they are supposed to.

Second, in campaigns: the day you email twelve thousand people, the shop takes the spike instead of falling over exactly when you were spending on ads.

And third, over time, in your traffic. A shop that answers fast gets crawled better and abandoned less, and that shows up in Google eventually — although, as we covered in where to start when you do not appear on Google, speed is rarely the first thing to fix.

Shall we look at what is holding you back?

If your shop takes longer than you would like and you do not know where to start, write to us. We work out which part is the shop and which part is the machine, and tell you what can be fixed in a morning and what needs a change of address.

Tell us about your case