WP Activity Log and WordPress website speed

WP Activity Log has been optimized throughout the years to ensure optimal performance and efficient resource usage. We have many customers logging thousands and even tens of thousands of events per month without any meaningful slowdown. So, in general, speed issues are rare.

However, with so many variables on WordPress sites, hosting packages, and more, edge cases do occur, potentially leading to a slower website/backend.

Luckily, there’s often a relatively easy fix to get your site running smoothly again. In this post, we will discuss these edge cases and what you can do about them.

Slowing down your site?

There are a number of situations where performance issues can happen. These are: 

• Limited resources: If the WordPress web server does not have enough resources to run 
• Plugin conflicts: A conflict with another plugin can lead to website slowdowns

We’ll go into each of these below and show you what you can do to address the issue.

Limited resources

WordPress websites with a large user base, such as e-commerce and membership setups, typically consume a lot of server resources. A large user base generates a larger number of events, which need to be recorded into the database. 

While in most cases this does not cause issues, smaller hosting packages (such as those on a shared plan) or sites with multiple other resource-heavy plugins may experience performance issues. In such cases, increasing the resource limits/upgrading your hosting plan could offer a solution.

Side note: WP Activity Log only logs changes made by logged-in users. Therefore, the plugin will not consume more resources when the number of visitors increases, but only when the number of logged in users/actions they take increases.

How to know whether it’s caused by limited resources

There are various things you can check to see if the issue is caused by limited resources, including:

Your control panel

If you have cPanel, head to Metrics > Resource Usage where you’ll see graphs related to CPU, memory, and DB usage, among others. If your hosting provider uses a different control panel, it will generally offer similar data. If you can’t find it, ask your hosting provider for help.

Make sure you check during peak hours (when resources are required in greater numbers) and off-peak hours. If you see you’re hitting the limit regularly, your WordPress site likely needs more resources to function smoothly.

For each resource, such as CPU and memory, you’ll find a graph, which shows:

• Resource limit: This is essentially the resources allocated to you
• Resource average: This indicates average usage over time. If it is reaching the limit line, it means that the current resource allocation is a bottleneck

In the example below, we can also see how many resources the database is using (marked in blue)

Checking for slowdowns

If WordPress doesn’t have access to the resources it needs, you should see slowdowns that get worse at times when you have many logged-in users/heavy tasks are being run. While this is not as accurate as using cPanel (or equivalent) it’s a good indicator more resources are required.

Some examples of situations where limited resources might lead to slowdowns on a website:

• The plugin being installed on a website that was already resource-strained, and being set up to track thousands of events per day.
• A website on a low-tier (shared) hosting plan keeping years’ worth of activity logging data, ultimately resulting in a large database that consumes more resources to read and write to.
• Large multi-site networks with many sites and many users/events that surpass their hosting package’s limits. 

If limited resources are causing issues for your website, there are basically two main things you can do. You can increase the resources available for your site, or reduce the load on the server.

Here is what you can do to resolve the issue:

1. Disable and delete unused plugins

All plugins require resources to run. Because resources are finite, we need to make sure that resources are being put to good use. If you have plugins that are not being used, disabling/deleting them frees up resources. 

Keep in mind that plugins such as firewalls, e-commerce plugins, and similar plugins require many more resources than plugins such as Hello Dolly, for example.

This is not to say you should not install certain plugins, or that there is a hard limit on how many plugins you should install. Install the plugins you need to achieve the functionality you need and ensure that they have enough resources to run properly.

2. Disable WP Activity Log events

You can disable specific events not relevant to you from being logged by WP Activity Log. Doing so minimizes the resources that WP Activity Log needs to run. 

Note: For example, some blogs have a visitor counter on their blog posts, showing people how many people read the post. If this is being logged, then every time a user visits a blog post, an event is triggered in WP Activity Log. This can consume a lot of resources and isn’t that useful to track. By disabling this event, you can significantly reduce the plugin’s resource usage.

It can be worth checking the logs to see if there are events being triggered in your setup that might not be so useful and disabling them. Obviously, this will differ for everyone, so spending a few minutes browsing the logs can help you uncover which, if any events can be disabled.

However, keep in mind that disabled events are not tracked and cannot be retrieved later. While we recommend logging all events to get a full and true picture of everything that is happening on your WordPress site, disabling events can help you reduce resource usage if the events aren’t of interest to you.

To disable events, navigate to WP Activity Log > Enable/Disable Events and untick the events you do not want to track.

3. Update your hosting plan

Shared hosting plans are great for achieving a web presence on a budget. Shared hosting, however, tends to struggle as the website grows. This is due to the fact that resources are shared with other websites. 

As such, we recommend updating your plan to dedicated hosting once you surpass the 10-user mark. Of course, this depends on how active the users are. Is everyone logged in at the same time? How active is each user?

We also recommend upgrading to 4GB-6GB of RAM once you surpass the 1,000-user mark, or if running heavy ecommerce/membership-type plugins alongside WP Activity Log. 

Again, the hosting plan that works for you will depend on your setup and on how active your users are, which can be hard to quantify.

If your hosting provider provides stats, make sure you keep an eye on these, paying particular attention to usage during peak hours.

4. Offload the database

A large database can contribute to slower website response times. If you’re tracking all events for many users on a busy website, the database may get larger than normal. As such, you might want to consider moving the database to a server other than your WordPress server.

WP Activity Log enables you to save the activity log data to an external MySQL server, thereby reducing the load on the WordPress database. You can do this by navigating to WP Activity Log > Integrations and following the instructions there.

Pro tip: WP Activity Log Premium also comes with archiving. This enables you to configure the plugin to keep a set span of logs, like 3 months worth, and automatically archive any older logs to a separate database.

Plugin conflicts

Plugins and themes are developed by different vendors. While most vendors will test plugins and updates before release, it is virtually impossible to test every scenario. A plugin or theme update may not play well with your particular setup, which may lead to constant or intermittent performance issues. Here is what you can do to resolve the issue:

How to know whether it’s caused by plugin conflicts?

• Look out for errors that the plugin might throw in the error logs. These can usually be found in your hosting provider’s control panel.
• In most cases, the issue appears intermittently, independent of server load

Pro tip: Before proceeding to the steps below, it may be worth checking whether the performance issue you are encountering also manifests in a staging environment.

Staging environments have a lot less user activity and, therefore, fewer events should be logged. If your staging site has no performance issues with an identical setup, it’s likely a resource issue. However, if you still experience issues on your staging site, it’s an indication that a plugin conflict might be the more likely cause.

This isn’t 100% foolproof, but it’s a good place to start.

1. Update all plugins

Most plugin issues are resolved with updates, so your first port of call should be to make sure all plugins are up to date. If you have any plugins you’re not using, disable them and uninstall them, as these can cause unnecessary conflicts.

2. Disable/enable plugins

If you’re still seeing issues, start by taking a benchmark of how long pages take to load. You can do this using Chrome DevTools, checking the performance tab when logged in.

Tip: You might need to click around your WordPress dashboard a bit to get an average idea of how slow the backend is.

Next, disable all plugins except WP Activity Log and run another benchmark. Compare this result with the result from the previous benchmark, and if there is a performance improvement, start re-enabling the plugins one by one. 

With each plugin re-enabled, test website performance until service degradation occurs. Once it does, check if disabling WP Activity Log improves it.

If it does, it means there’s likely a conflict between the two plugins. In that case, please get in touch with the Melapress support team by opening a ticket so that we can look into it. 

If, on the other hand, when you disable WP Activity Log there’s no improvement, it signals there’s a conflict between two other plugins. In that case, contact the provider of the third-party plugin that caused the issue when it was activated.

No luck – reach out!

If none of the above procedures help improve website performance, get in touch with us so that our dedicated support team can look into it. Do include screenshots or copies of any errors you might have come across as this will help the team better understand what the underlying issue might be and thus resolve the problem faster.