Slow WordPress Admin? Fix It Now [Step By Step]

Is your WordPress admin slow? It is one of the most frustrating things when you are high on your mood and want to finish your work productively within the given time, but your website backend performs so low that you don’t know how to fix it.

Many website owners face this, and it is one of the most common issues. But don’t worry, I will help you to make your WordPress Admin faster.

In this article, I will be covering right from the reasons and various methods to fix your WordPress backend being slow so that you don’t have to deal with it anymore or pay for an expensive WordPress customization service.

What causes the WordPress Admin Slow?

There is no exact reason for what is causing your WordPress backend to slow for your specific site, but here I am introducing the most common issue for your poorly performing dashboard:

1. The memory limit of your WordPress dashboard is very slow
2. The database is cluttered
3. You are using an outdated version of PHP
4. Usage of heavy plugins and resources
5. Loading way too many resources like CSS or JS files
6. Having unnecessary dashboard widgets
7. WordPress heartbeat API

There are many more causes that make your WordPress backend slow, so now I will show you various methods to fix this issue quickly without much hassle.

How to Fix WordPress Admin Slow Issue?

You can do the following things to make your WordPress admin faster:

1. Identify and Remove High CPU Usage Plugins

Maybe your site contains many high CPU usage plugins that take a lot of time and resources to run, and due to this, the WordPress site takes more time to respond.

The standard plugins that make your site slow are maps, statistics, broken link checker, image slider, which frequently run a scan or the process in your site.

So in order to find high resource-heavy plugins in WordPress, all you have to do is install the Simple Query Monitor WordPress plugin. This Plugin will help you debug database queries, PHP errors, HTTPS API, and most essential, to identify the slowest loading plugins in your site.

Once installed go to your WordPress dashboard. You will see the plugin stats at the top of the page. Click on Queries by component to see the slowest loading plugins. Once you have found out the slowest loading plugins, and remove those plugins from your site if they are not necessary.

2. Remove All the Unused Plugins and Themes

Having all the unused plugins and themes makes your WordPress admin slow because they require a lot of space and make your dashboard look like a mess.

 WordPress also recommends removing or delete plugins or themes that are unused in order to make your website run smoothly.

So follow the steps given below to remove it:

1. Open your Website Dashboard
2. Go to Plugins
3. Click on Installed Plugins
4. Go to Inactive Section
5. Select all the inactive plugins
6. Click on Delete

Similarly, for removing themes, all you have to do is:

1. Open your Website Dashboard
2. Go to Appearance
3. Click on the Themes option
4. Then, click on any inactive theme
5. At the bottom right side, you will see a Delete option to delete the theme
6. Click on the Delete button to delete the theme

Many Hosting Companies, by default, limit your WordPress memory to mostly 32MB, which is not enough, especially if you are dealing with lots of plugins installed on your site.

3. Expand your WordPress Memory Limit

Sometimes you may have seen an error when you are processing anything on your site saying your WordPress backend is running slow. This is because your site needs more memory to run all the different kinds of tasks efficiently.

Expanding the memory limit of WordPress will help you fix the WordPress admin slow issue. But first, you have to check the current limit set by your Hosting Provider.

If you are using WordPress version 5.0 or above, then you can check it easily. All you have to do is:

1. Go to Tools
2. Click on Site Health
3. Click on Info and scroll down to your Server section

If you want to increase your memory limit, you can do the following:

1. Now login to your hosting cPanel and then File Manager
2. Go to the root directory of your WordPress site
3. Navigate the “wp-config.php” file
4. Add the following code define ( ‘WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ‘256M’ ) in the end of the file
5. Lastly, save the file

Important: If you’re not good at programming, I would highly recommend that you contact your hosting provider first and ask them to increase memory limit for you.

Note – Many Hosting Providers don’t allow the users to access to your file and make changes. If the same thing is happening with you, then you have to reach out to your Hosting Provider for expanding your WordPress Memory Limit

4. Optimize your WordPress database

When you make any changes on your website like installing a plugin or editing a page WordPress database stores everything that you do in your WordPress dashboard.

However, this database also stores unnecessary things such as spam comments, page or post revisions, and many more. Because of this, the WordPress database is cluttered with unnecessary data, and as a result, it takes more time to run queries and respond.

But, you can fix this issue by clearing and optimizing your database.

Note – Make sure you take your backup for optimizing your database.

If you are using the WP-Optimize Plugin for cleaning up your database, then follow the steps given below:

1. Go to your WordPress dashboard
2. Click on the WP-Optimize option
3. Select the things which are stored unnecessarily in your database
4. Click on Run Selected Optimizations to clean up our WordPress database

5. Use Heartbeat Control

The Heartbeat API of WordPress gives all the users the ability to make real-time communication between their browser and server while they are signed into the WordPress dashboard.

This feature helps auto-save your posts in the WordPress editor, but it can slow down your dashboard because of its new AJAX request that transmits every 15 to 60 seconds.

When the editor is open, this Heartbeat API is continuously active and consumes a lot of time. So the most simple and easy solution is to disable it altogether. So follow the steps given below to disable it:

1. Install Heartbeat Control Plugin to control the Heartbeat API
2. Once installed, activate the Plugin
3. Open your WordPress Dashboard
4. Go to Settings
5. Reduce or Disable the Heartbeat API for different areas of your dashboard

6. Disable Object and Database Cache in W3 Total Cache

The W3 Total Cache plugin is one of the best and most amazing plugins to speed up your WordPress site. However, if you have not set up this Plugin correctly, it can cause you to slow down your website.

So if you are using this plugin, then I recommend that you Disable Object and Database Cache by following the steps given below:

1. Open your WordPress dashboard
2. Go to Performance
3. Click on General Settings
4. Tick off the Database Cache and Object Cache option to disable it

7. Use the Latest Version of PHP

Having your outdated PHP version will add more security risk in any kind of way. The exact interpretation of PHP that your site uses depends on the PHP version installed in your hosting server.

Talking about being more secure, new versions of PHP offers more significant performance improvements. That is why the core team of WordPress is pushing all the WordPress users to update their PHP version to the most and recent PHP version.

The latest version of PHP can manage more than triple requests than PHP 5.6 version. But many users still use the same old PHP version 5.6. There are no benefits to running an old PHP version.

The benchmarks of WordPress shows us that speed and performance increases are significant in newer versions. There are no perks of using an outdated or older version of PHP or keeping plugins that don’t support the latest release.

In order to change your PHP version, contact your hosting provider and ask them to do it.
Make sure to test the website after it’s done.

Another suggestion is to not mage huge “jumps” between versions. If you have PHP 5.6 then using PHP 7.4 might be a big jump. Start by increasing the version to 7.0 and then if everything works well, increase the version.

8. Disable Unnecessary Dashboard Widgets

The WordPress dashboard comes with lots of widgets like Welcome panel, WordPress events and news, Activity, and many more.

Each time you load your WordPress dashboard, these widgets make an external call to show you the information, due to which WordPress dashboard becomes slow.

If you notice that your WordPress admin is slow, then you can disable necessary widgets that you don’t use by following the steps given below:

1. Click here to go Widget Disable plugin
2. Install and activate this Plugin
3. Go to your WordPress Dashboard
4. Go to Appearance
5. Click on the Dashboard Widgets tab
6. Select the widgets that you want to disable it
7. Once all the widgets are selected, click on the Save Changes option to save it

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What are the most common solution for WordPress admin slow issue?

Well, the most common solutions you can apply is removing your High CPU plugins, using a better cache plugin, using W3 total cache, upgrading your PHP to the latest version, and many more.

2. Which plugins slow down the admin panel?

 – The plugins which slow down the admin panel are social sharing, page builders, related post, sitemap, WooCommerce, and many more. Therefore, it is recommended that you should use lightweight plugins that are maintained and coded in a reasonable manner.

3. What is the WP-Optimize Plugin, and how does it help?

WP-Optimize is an essential and revolutionary WordPress performance plugin that helps all its users clean their databases and compress their images and cache on your site.

Conclusion

WordPress admin being slow is a massive problem for all the website owners like me. A slow dashboard can affect your website badly, and it can hurt your SEO, reduce conversion rates, and create a bad user experience.

Applying the above-given fixes like using the latest version of PHP, removing unnecessary used plugins, disabling unnecessary dashboard widgets, and may more help you to improve your both WordPress front end so that you can stay 100% focused on your WordPress dashboard.

So if your website is running slow or having a WordPress backend slow issue, apply these above-given fixes thoroughly in your WordPress website. Then check your website speed’s rating using tools like GTMetrix and Google Page Speed to see how pages are loading and let me know if this works for you or not.