Most slow stores have one of a handful of causes. Work through these in order; each step takes a minute.
- Is it the whole server or one store?
Graphs tab: if CPU and load are high, the server is busy (see overloaded server). If they are low, look at the store itself.
- Bots?
Traffic tab: a high share of bots or one address with thousands of requests. Protection handles most of them; see bot protection.
- Caches on?
Magento: all cache types enabled (Actions, Enable all caches), Redis in use, production mode.
- Full page cache hit rate
Varnish card: below 50% means pages are rebuilt too often.
- Slow PHP requests
Logs tab, PHP slow requests: shows which code was running when a request took too long.
- Cron and indexers
Magento indexers set to Update by schedule, and cron running (no huge queue).
- Database
Large log tables, missing indexes or very big quotes tables slow everything.
- Search engine
OpenSearch active and with enough memory.
- Images
Huge images on category pages: use WebP and the right sizes.
- Third-party scripts
Chat widgets, trackers and fonts loaded from other sites slow the browser, not the server. Test with PageSpeed Insights.
Stuck? Open a ticket with the address of a slow page and the time you tested. With Hosting AI you can also ask your AI developer to profile the store.
Did this solve it? If not, tell us what you see and we look at your server.
Open a ticket