This article will guide you to solve the problem of having high CPU usage in WordPress website. Before we dive into more details, check out our Hosting services for more information. There are several ways you can reduce high CPU usage in WordPress based website. Here we go:
1. Update WordPress:
If you are using the oldest version of WordPress then update now. First, take backup your site.
2. Update Plugins:
In most cases of high CPU usage in WordPress is implementing wrong plugins. Regular basis updating WordPress plugins to the latest versions most often reduce high CPU usage. If you’re running an old version of plugins, take a break to update to the latest version.
3. Avoid Beta Versions of Plugins:
Sometimes it would be great to use the cutting-edge versions of plugins, but it is only better to use stable versions of WordPress plugins. Try to avoid using alpha or beta or even release candidate can have bugs in the code which can cause CPU spikes.
4. Install a Caching Plugin:
To reduce CPU load by caching static copies of your pages on your Website space using caching plugins like W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache can improve the site performance. Static files use less CPU, memory and keep guard your shared hosting limits.
5. Disable WP-Cron:
On WordPress site WP-Cron manages all the scheduled events. Every time someone visits your website WP-Cron is a very common cause of high CPU loads. Disabling and replacing WP-Cron with a Real Cron Job can reduce CPU-load. Also preventing the account suspended due to exceeding hosting resources.
6. Only Use Plugins You Really Need:
It takes long time to load the website if there are lots of WordPress plugins installed. Deactivate and remove any plugin that waste the hosting resources. Just use a handful of plugins of your needs. This will speed up the website and keep the site visitors happy.
After disabled unnecessary plugins that still causes high CPU usage need to debugging each plugins to see that the plugins cause of the CPU spike. In this case take a backup of entire WordPress site including files and databases. Therefore disabling each plugins one after another until the CPU load has been resolved successfully. Final step, after disabled or deleted the faulty plugins and reactivate the other plugins without seeing the CPU problems.
7. Avoid Resource Hungry Plugins:
Whilst using WooCommerce or similar resource-hungry plugins, make sure you have sufficient web hosting resources. Hosted many websites that using CPU intensive WordPress plugins on a shared-hosting package dropped the site being suspended due to high-CPU loads.
Due to insufficient server resources on a standard shared-hosting or budget VPS hosting while hosted website usages CPU and Memory intensive plugins might performs badly. Symptoms are including slow loading pages, database errors and increased visitor abandonment.
8. Avoid buggy WordPress Themes:
A bad coding on WordPress Theme or coding with demanded features such as server-side image resizing can be CPU intensive. To avoid the problems with WordPress theme try the following:
a)
Check error logs for problems. Login to cPanel then check the Error logs for errors.
b)
Contact the theme developer and ask if there’s any known issues or coding bugs.
c)
Disable any dynamic features built into the theme like thumbnail resizing. Some WordPress themes have own image resizing modules which can cause high CPU usage. If possible disabling those modules in favour of using the more efficient image resizing built into the WordPress core.
9. Use PHP 7 to 8:
Switching between PHP 7 to 8 can dramatically speed up your WordPress website reduces the loading time and also freeing up CPU and memory. Recommend test of a staging version of the website with PHP 7 to 8 before changing the production version.
10. Increase PHP Memory Limit:
Usually increasing the amount of memory available on WordPress website can help fix high CPU errors in WordPress. Safer recommendation is increasing the PHP memory to at least 64MB, good baseline 128MB and recommend 256MB.
Further more you have knew and learned how to fix high CPU usage in WordPress.