Improve WordPress Admin Speed: Essential Tips for Faster Backend Performance

A slow WordPress admin dashboard can be frustrating, but understanding the causes and solutions will help speed up your workflow. Here are key reasons your WordPress backend might lag and tips for improving its performance.

1. Plugins and Themes

Your installed plugins and themes may slow down your WordPress admin dashboard, particularly if they need to be updated or better coded. Plugins that perform resource-heavy tasks, such as backups or security scans, may hog server resources, also for any analytics plugins or reporting plugins that cause slow queries to generate those and then slow down the site’s database performance.

Solution: Review your plugins and themes regularly, deactivating and uninstalling those you don’t need. Keeping them updated is crucial. You can also use tools like the Query Monitor plugin to identify plugins causing slowdowns or APM monitoring solutions such as New Relic or Datadog.

2. Web Hosting

Low-quality hosting can also result in a sluggish admin area. Shared hosting plans may not provide sufficient resources when multiple users are active on the server. All it can take is very noisy neighbor (plan or collection of sites), and then the performance for your sites hosted on that server can be impacted.

Solution: Consider upgrading your hosting plan. Managed WordPress hosting, virtual private servers (VPS), or dedicated servers often provide more resources and better performance. If you need help, ask your host if they can move your site to a faster server.

3. Database Issues

Over time, your WordPress database can become bloated with unnecessary data, like post revisions and transient options, which can slow down your site, including the backend. Also, look for plugins that cause their custom database tables to be bloated. An example could be email-sending plugins that use external services for those but then store a lot of data for logging. Also, any plugin that might have an error and cause bloat in Action Scheduler, commonly used by WooCommerce but also used by other plugins for a task runner.

Solution: Cleaning up your database can resolve performance issues. Plugins like WP-Optimize or WP-Sweep help remove unnecessary data. Regularly optimizing your database ensures it remains efficient and fast.

4. PHP Version

Running an outdated PHP version could negatively impact your site’s speed. PHP is the programming language WordPress is built on, and newer versions offer significant performance improvements.

Solution: Make sure your site is running the latest version of PHP. You can update PHP through your hosting provider’s control panel or contact their support team for assistance.

5. Admin-Area Specific Plugins

Some plugins that specifically affect the admin dashboard can slow it down. For example, plugins that add custom widgets to the dashboard or track statistics may cause bottlenecks.

Solution: Disable or limit the number of admin-specific plugins. If you need certain admin tools, try to replace them with lightweight alternatives.

6. External HTTPS Requests

Specific plugins or themes may rely on external resources, such as fonts or APIs, which can delay the loading of your admin panel. Your admin interface could be better if these external resources quickly responded. Trying to reduce slow external requests on the front-end and the back-end of your site will enable you to have a faster experience with some of that being obvious on the back-end. APM solutions such as New Relic will be able to find out which specific external services are the slowest. Examples could be using a marketing platform but the data sync for that is slow.

Solution: Minimize the use of plugins that rely on external services. You can also use a caching solution to store static versions of these resources locally.

7. Object Caching

Object caching stores the results of database queries, which helps speed up both the front and back-end if those are database query heavy. WordPress has to retrieve the same data from the database repeatedly without caching, slowing down performance. Object caching gain might only sometimes be obvious, but over time and under heavy load, you will notice the difference in the parts of the WordPress site that are database query-heavy.

Solution: Enabling object caching can significantly improve your site’s speed. For this purpose, plugins like Redis Object Cache should be used for Redis integration on your site.

Addressing common causes like outdated plugins, slow hosting, or database bloat can drastically improve the performance of your WordPress admin dashboard. Regular maintenance and optimization will ensure your backend remains fast and responsive, enhancing overall productivity. Also, looking for plugins causing slow queries and duplicate queries in the site’s database is worth looking out for.

Useful Links

https://docs.newrelic.com/docs/tutorial-improve-app-performance/external-services/