What to do if your site is slow

This article is for anyone whose site feels slower than usual and wants to know where to start looking.

Step 1: Check the dashboard health indicator

Open your site in the SrvBot dashboard. The health rollup at the top of the site card summarises CPU, memory, disk, and request metrics. If any metric is elevated, it will show you which one. A yellow or red indicator is your first clue — expand it to see the specific signal.

Step 2: Look at recent activity

The activity feed shows recent deploys, backups, and automated actions. If a deploy ran shortly before the slowdown started, that's worth investigating. A failed deploy that partially applied changes, or a plugin update that introduced a performance regression, often shows up as elevated response times starting from a specific timestamp.

Step 3: Check per-site metrics

Go to site detail → Metrics. The graphs show CPU, memory, request rate, and response time over the last 24 hours (and further back if you zoom out). Look for the point where response time increased. Compare it with CPU and memory — if they're also spiking, the server is under load. If response time is up but CPU is normal, the bottleneck is likely a slow database query or an external API call your site is making.

Common causes

Plugin or dependency issue (WordPress): a recently updated plugin can add slow queries or extra HTTP calls. Deactivate plugins one at a time to isolate the culprit, starting with anything updated in the last 24 hours.

Sudden traffic increase: a post or page went viral, or a scheduled email campaign drove a spike of visitors. The metrics graphs will show a matching spike in request rate. If traffic remains high, contact us — we can adjust your resource allocation.

Slow external service: your site may be calling an external API (payment processor, CRM, newsletter service) that is itself responding slowly. Check the service's own status page if you suspect this.

Large media files: very large images or videos served directly from your site (rather than a CDN) slow down every page that loads them. Consider using a media optimisation plugin or moving large assets to object storage.

When to contact support

If the metrics look normal but the site still feels slow, or if you've worked through the steps above and can't identify the cause, reach out. Include the site name and a rough timestamp of when you first noticed the slowdown — it helps us pull the right logs.

Still stuck? Reply to any email you've received from us, or send a note to [email protected]. A human will be with you within an hour during business hours.