One of the greatest benefits of using WordPress is its customizability. The drawback to this is that WordPress may be easily configured so that it has high resource usage. Your resource usage on shared hosting can impact the experience of other users on your server, breaching your compliance with the terms of service, and causing administrators to have to suspend your site with little to no warning in order to preserve the health of the server.


The vast majority of issues that would cause WordPress to consume too many resources to function well are cause by issues that are beyond our scope of support (third party design and script support). However, this article recommends options for optimizing WordPress and reducing the CPU and resource consumption so that you have a better hosting experience.


Before making any changes to your WordPress installation, it is recommended that a manual backup is run to prevent any possible complications and allow the restoration of your site in the future, if needed.

  • Upgrade to the latest version of WordPress: The latest versions have optimized code that could reduce the CPU consumption of your site. Please click the link below to expand directions for updating WordPress to the latest version:

    • ▷ Update WordPress

  • Review your plugins: WordPress users are already familiar with how dramatically plugins can affect the behavior of a website, and resource usage is no exception. 


  • Minimize the number of WP Crons: The WordPress Cron job is a resource intensive task that runs every single time your WordPress is accessed. 

  • Limit WebCrawlers and Bots: Webcrawlers can often cause resource problems for WordPress sites. The first tool for protecting your site against webcrawlers is a robots.txt file.

    In addition to robots.txt, Bing and Google Webmaster accounts offer tools to help reduce the rate that crawlers initiate requests with your site, reducing the resources, and allowing for more legitimate traffic to be served.


  • Check Your Theme: Sometimes the coding of a theme can cause resource issues on a WordPress site. Fortunately, this is simple to test for. Click the link below to expand instructions for checking your theme (Note: This method will not work for sites that are currently access restricted. The site must be able to have traffic to test resource usage accurately):
    1. Set your WordPress to a default theme.
    2. After several hours of usage, check your resources to see how your WordPress functions with the default theme.
    3. Activate your theme of choice.
    4. After several hours of usage, check your resources to see how the new theme has impacted the resource usage of your site.
  • If your theme is causing resource issues for your site, you need to contact your theme developer or select a new theme.

These changes are not guaranteed fixes, but do provide a starting point for correcting high load issues on WordPress sites. These recommendations are provided in order of complexity, and will have varying results depending on the specific cause of the resource usage of your WordPress site.