Question

I have a drupal site up live (probably won’t be in use for a long time) and it is running unbelievably slow 90% of the time.

What might be the cause of such a slow response time on the site?

Are there any measures/settings I need to change to make it run faster/normal?

Please let me know your thoughts, and feel free to ask further questions about the configuration so I can get to the bottom of this. Thanks.

Site: http://hoosierdigs.com

Answer 1

Judging by the extremely poor performance of your site, I’d have to say your host is probably the main issue here.

It looks like you might be using iPage to host your website and they have been known to be a slow web host, especially if you’re on their super cheap $2/mo plans. If you need inexpensive web hosting, I’ve found GoDaddy to be a bit better for about $4/mo… otherwise if you have a general amount you can spend on your web hosting, I can recommend some web hosts in your price range.

Other than that, the main trick to Drupal performance is "caching", like tulvit said, check to make sure you have page caching on, also turning on aggregation can help too… here:
http://yourdomain.com/admin/config/development/performance

If you want a fast Drupal website, be sure to choose a webhost that will provide some of the technologies such as APC, Memcached, Varnish, etc.

I’d say one of the single most important things you can do outside of Drupal, is get APC.
https://www.php.net/manual/en/book.apc.php