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How To Troubleshoot Slow Wordpress Admin Panel
By Tim Gross - Internet Business Blog | October 24, 2008
If your Wordpress blog is running slow, especially the Admin panel, here’s how to troubleshoot and fix it.
Note: Regardless of what you think, it may not be Wordpress or your hosting company’s fault, even if it seems like it is.
1) Change your Wordpress Theme to the default theme, see if pages load faster. If it does, consider switching to a different theme.
2) Disable your plugins. Some plugins check back to the creator’s site for updates automatically, and if their site is down or if the plugin is buggy, it could slow everything to a halt.
If you can’t get into your Wordpress Admin panel because it’s running too slow to even disable the plugins, FTP to your /wp-content/plugins directory and temporarily rename the /plugins folder so Wordpress can’t see it, or download the files in /plugins and delete them from your website as a test.
If that fixes the problem, re-upload and/or enable individual plugins to find out which one is killing your load time, and stop using that one.
3) If you’re using a router for your home/business networking, try bypassing the router entirely and connect a computer directly to the modem. For me, that fixed the problem, which means it’s a router issue (surprised me, I’ll tell you). Solution: Troubleshoot your router, see if it needs a firmware upgrade, try disabling its firewall options. I use a Linksys router, their support is 1-800-326-7114 and for $9.95 if they can fix the problem, they’ll upgrade your firmware and tweak your settings, it did the trick for me.
4) It could be an Internet hop/connectivity problem. In Windows, click Start=> Run, enter “cmd” (click enter)
Then, enter “yourwebsitename.com tracert” (for me, timgross.com tracert”)
You’ll see each “hop” in the Internet that connects that website to you. If one of them “times out”, that could be the problem. I had a hop timing out and THOUGHT that was my problem, but it turns out it wasn’t, it was the router.
Solution: If you’re sure it’s not a router issue, call your Internet access company and tell them you’re having a traceroute problem to a website, and give them the details. In theory, they can reroute the paths to fix the problem.
2nd Solution: Use an anonymous proxy server like worksurfing.com and try connecting through it. I was actually able to log onto my Wordpress Admin and post successfully doing that before I fixed the problem. Drawbacks: They throw popup ads at you, annoying.
5) Check to see if your MySQL Database needs to be optimized or fixed. Download plugin WP-DBmanager and activate it. You can optimize and fix (as well as back up) the MySQL database running Wordpress, which may fix problems that are slowing it down.
I hope that helps… When I was trying to fix the problem, I didn’t run across any info about it possibly being a router problem, so I hope this helps somebody! 
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