Why WordPress Admin Slow? 17 Reasons & How to Fix It

WordPress backend loading, which is what a user sees when navigating to their WordPress site’s dashboard or editing its content. It has been sluggish for many WordPress users. WordPress admin slow is a major problem and it can make the site’s content editing process frustrating for both WordPress admins and their clients.

So no one wants to wait that long when they are trying to do something in the WordPress admin panel.

In this blog post, I will discuss the most common causes of WordPress backend slowness and provide you with solutions that will help fix it!

WordPress admin is usually the most-used section of WordPress site. It is possible that WordPress admin loading time will increase over time as you and your website grow in size, complexity, and traffic.

Some of the top reasons that can slow your WordPress admin.

How To Fix A Slow WordPress Admin Dashboard: 17 Tips & Reasons

What if your WordPress admin is still slow? Here are some of the WordPress troubleshooting tips to fix WordPress backend loading problem.

1) Site Structure

One of the biggest factors that can slow down your WordPress admin dashboard is your website’s structure. If your site has a lot of pages, posts, and other content, it can take time for WordPress to load them all in the admin area.

Also, a lot of custom post types and taxonomies can slow down your WordPress admin.

By improving the site’s structure, you can speed up your admin dashboard. Start by creating a hierarchical system for your content. This will help keep the number of pages, posts, and custom post types manageable.

As a result, your WordPress admin loading time will be much faster. Additionally, you should optimize the database tables. You can take advantage of phpMyAdmin for this.

(2) Consider Upgrading Your Hosting

WordPress.org recommends WordPress-optimized hosting, which is a level of WordPress hosting that has been configured to work best with WordPress.

Sometimes your host may not work as well with WordPress as WordPress does. If you are on a shared server, this is likely the case.

So upgrading your existing hosting can solve your WordPress admin speed problems.

A WordPress-optimized hosting provider will generally be more expensive, but you get what you pay for, and WordPress will load much more quickly.

I recommend using any of the following optimized hosting providers if you have enough budget.

• Kinsta
• Flywheel
• Bluehost
• Nexcess

Here is the guide for the best WordPress-managed hosting.

(3) Use the Latest Version of PHP

WordPress requires PHP to load all WordPress data. The latest version of PHP is recommended for WordPress, especially if the WordPress admin is slow while loading.

If WordPress is loaded on your server and WordPress admin is slow, but other PHP-heavy sites are loading well, then WordPress may not be compatible with your version of PHP.

So you should change your PHP version to the latest version. If you use cPanel hosting, then simply login cPanel and go Selected PHP version feature then change your current PHP version to the latest one.

(4) Upgrade WordPress Version

If WordPress admin is slow, it might be time to upgrade your WordPress version. WordPress updates come with new features and bug fixes, so WordPress developers recommend that you update WordPress periodically to get these benefits.

If WordPress is too old or out of date, it may be time for an upgrade because updating WordPress can fix security bugs as well as speed up the backend by caching more aggressively.

(5) Disable Trackbacks & Pingbacks 

Pingbacks are when blog authors notify other blogs that they have linked to their content. WordPress is set to ping blogs automatically, but it’s an outdated protocol that can be disabled easily in the WordPress admin panel.

So sometimes your WordPress backend may slow down because of WordPress pinging other blogs.

Disable trackbacks: 

Trackbacks are the same thing as Pingbacks except they’re for private messages from blog authors and WordPress does not send them out by default. You may choose to disable these if you are not connecting with other WordPress blogs.

(6) Use Query Monitor To Sniff Out Slow Plugins

You can use a query monitor WordPress plugin to sniff out WordPress plugins that are slowing down your WordPress admin.

You can also use the WordPress debug mode and check “show WordPress tables” to see WordPress queries and slow plugins.

I will highly recommend using Query Monitor which lets you find WordPress plugins that are slowing down WordPress admin.

It will show you which WordPress queries are slowing down your WordPress admin, and it also has a WordPress debug mode.

This WordPress plugin is easy to use yet very powerful, and it’s a one-click solution for WordPress admin slow loading issues.

If you find any plugin that causes for backend slow loading of WordPress, you can disable or uninstall them.

(7) Use Heartbeat Control

The WordPress Heartbeat API helps WordPress backend loading speed and backend performance.

WordPress Heartbeat API was introduced in WordPress version four point two (version: WordPress v/s WP) to improve WordPress core features, including the administration panel’s front page and dashboard page load time.

WordPress heartbeat is set in seconds by default, so the value you enter should be less than five minutes.

To control WordPress heartbeat you can use WP Rocket plugin that lets you adjust WordPress heartbeat to your needs.

8) Heartbeat API

The Heartbeat API is one of the most common culprits for slow WordPress admin. This API is responsible for sending out requests for the user’s activity.

If this API is overused, it can cause a considerable amount of lag in the WordPress dashboard. You can find it in the “wp-admin/includes” folder.

To fix this issue, you can use the Heartbeat Control plugin to limit the frequency of requests made by the Heartbeat API. The plugin will allow you to customize the settings and determine how often these requests are sent.

After installing and activating the plugin, go to –

Settings >> Heartbeat Control

Once it is done, click on “Modify Heartbeat” under the “General Settings” tab. Then, adjust the sliding panel, which says “Override Heartbeat Frequency.” Click on “Save Changes” to finish your work. Reload the WordPress admin to verify the changes.

You can also deactivate the Heartbeat API completely if it is not necessary. For this, copy and paste the following code in the functions.php after locating the file –

add_action( 'init', 'stop_heartbeat', 1 );
function stop_heartbeat() {
wp_deregister_script('heartbeat');
}

(9) Clean Your Database

WordPress admin becomes slow because of the cumulative effect of many small requests for data. WordPress has to load all database tables on each request, and these requests take time.

Also, WordPress queries are cached by default so subsequent page loads will be faster if they come from the cache rather than querying the database again.

Cleaning your WordPress database can help reduce WordPress admin loading time. WordPress does not automatically remove old data, so it can easily pile up and slow down WordPress backend performance.

The best way to clean your WordPress database is by using Advanced Database Cleaner or WP Rocket plugin on a regular basis. 

WP Rocket will help keep the size of WordPress tables smaller deleting no needed information. It also helps you delete all unused WordPress cache tables, WordPress transient options, WordPress update (core) files, and WordPress auto-save data.

WP Rocket automatically handles everything for you with a single click on the “preconfigured scripts” tab.

(10) Increase WordPress Memory Limit

By default, WordPress memory limit is set to 256MB. So slow loading of WordPress admin can be caused by a low WordPress memory limit, which restricts the number of WordPress processes that are executed at a given time.

Allow WordPress admin pages and plugins to use more CPU resources with this code snippet in wp-config.php

define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '512M');

This WordPress code snippet will allocate a minimum of 512MB to WordPress, which should be more than enough for most WordPress websites.

(11) Disable Unnecessary Dashboard Widgets

By default, WordPress has many widgets like WordPress News, WordPress Plugins, WordPress Links available that take up memory and slow down WordPress admin page.

Due to some unnecessary dashboard widgets, your WordPress backend can slow and it becomes more complicated.

To make WordPress admin fast and easy to use, you can disable unnecessary WordPress dashboard widgets using WordPress dashboard plugins. 

Simply install and activate the free Widget Disable plugin from WordPress repository then go to Appearance → Disable Widgets and get rid of all the widgets that you don’t use.

(12) Limit Post Revisions And Autosave

Autosave of WordPress posts can be one of the reasons for slowing WordPress admin. WordPress autosave feature saves a copy of your post every time you make changes to it and stores them with revision numbers.

So you can disable autosave of every post by adding a simple code snippet to your WordPress wp-config.php file

//disable WP Post Revisions
define('AUTOSAVE_INTERVAL', 300); // seconds
define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', false);

(13) Protect The wp-login Page

WordPress admin should be one of the most secure pages on your website, but you may have made some security mistakes that are exposing it to WordPress login page hacking attempts.

You should not protect only against hackers but also prevents spam bots from using your server to login. So automatic login bots consume server resources when they attempt to login to your site. 

Sometimes for this reason your WordPress admin can be slow. So better you should protect your admin login page.

You can change the default admin login URL using a plugin called WP Hide Login or you can use iThemes for your entire site security.

iThemes security plugin has lots of features. So along with many security features, you can change the default admin login address (URL) just by simply adding the custom URL slug text.

(14) Disable Browser Extensions

Sometimes browser extensions can slow WordPress admin. So, you can disable all browser extensions and see if there is any change in WordPress loading speed.

If you want to re-enable a specific extension, do not forget to enable it before opening WordPress Admin again.

(15) Slow Plugins

Of course, there are no alternatives to plugins for adding extra functions to your WordPress site. However, they can also be a major cause of a slow WordPress admin dashboard.

Using a slow plugin or a large number of plugins has a significant impact on the admin area. This will slow down the WordPress admin if the plugins are not optimized.

Go to “Plugins” on your WordPress dashboard to find the plugins that are slowing down your WordPress admin.

After that, disable the plugins that you think are responsible for a slow WordPress admin. If the loading time improves, you know the plugin was causing the issue.

Disable or delete such plugins after identifying them. If you want to use them, then optimize them by replacing heavy scripts with lighter ones, or disabling certain features.

Aside from these, ensure you are using the latest version of the plugins.

(16) External HTTP Requests

Such requests can be a major cause of a slow WordPress admin dashboard. They are requests from other websites that send data to your site.

This involves Facebook, Twitter, Google, or any other website. The problem is, when these requests take a long time to complete, they can slow down your entire site, including the admin panel.

To address this issue, you can use a plugin like Heartbeat Control to disable or limit the frequency of external HTTP requests.

This will speed up your admin dashboard and reduce server load. On top of that, you should consider removing any scripts that are running on external sites to improve performance.

(17) Admin Toolbar

The admin toolbar is located at the top of every page in the WordPress dashboard. This can cause a slow WordPress admin dashboard.

The admin toolbar loads every time you access a page and can slow down the loading time if it is too large.

To reduce the size of the toolbar, go to –

Users >> Your Profile

Then, uncheck the items next to “Show Toolbar when viewing site” under the “Toolbar” section. If you want to completely disable the toolbar, you can use a plugin like Adminimize.

This plugin allows you to disable all unwanted items from the toolbar and improve loading times.

Another way to disable the admin toolbar is to add the following chunk of code to the functions.php file –

/* Turn off the WordPress Admin Bar for all users */
add_filter( 'show_admin_bar', '__return_false' );

Also, you can turn off the admin toolbar for a specific user if you paste the following code instead –

if ( ! current_user_can( 'manage_options' ) ) {
    add_filter('show_admin_bar', '__return_false');
}

In Conclusion

Finally, the above guide is about the reasons for slow WordPress admin and how to fix the slow loading of the WordPress admin backend.

The most common reason for WordPress admin slow is because WordPress database is not optimized well, and WordPress scripts are malfunctioning or failing for some reason. Sometimes WordPress admin slows if the server has the poor performance to handle all requests at once.

So I hope the above tips can help WordPress users to know the reasons for WordPress admin slow and how to fix WordPress backend loading.