The discussion revolves around the issue of a slow site according to Google Search Console. The site’s owner, iraszl, shares a graph showing the slow page speeds and asks for advice. Stephen suggests that Google measures a flat HTML version of the site, which differs from the user’s experience. He notes that the site is running incredibly slow and asks about the plugins being used.
Iraszl shares a list of installed plugins, and Stephen recommends commenting out the disabled plugins, as 21 plugins are a lot to handle. Iraszl asks for instructions on how to do this and later reports that removing the plugins significantly improved the site’s speed.
Merefield cautions that it’s not scientific to assume all plugins were causing the issue and suggests that it might have been just one plugin. However, they agree that 21 plugins are too many and advise using discretion when installing plugins, keeping only high-quality and well-supported ones to a minimum.
Google Search console tells me that most pages on my discourse site are ‘slow’. See graph below:
When you visit the page https://www.graphicdesignforum.com/ you can see that it doesn’t feel slow, but I guess Google wants extreme speeds. Is there anything I can do about it?
The site runs on DO, with 2GB RAM on 2 vCPUs and charts look healthy to me:
Thank you!
Google sees a flat html version of the site, you see the discourse application, so what you experience versus what the crawler measures will always differ.
Your site does seem to be running incredibly slow right now. I tried opening it in chrome and it didn’t load before I finished drafting this response. Which plugins are you running? Are there any other things hosted on this machine?
Do you need the plugins which are currently disabled to stay installed? 11 of the 21 plugins currently installed are disabled.
21 is quite a lot. Loads in fact.
It may be prudent to comment those out and rebuild.
Thanks! No, I don’t need them. Can you give me links or instructions on how to comment out and rebuild? Is this done in Terminal on DO?
Is this correct?
Just a quick update. I removed the plugins as recommended. The site is now significantly faster. I think it would be a great idea to make this suggestion more apparent on the plugins page or even on the dashboard, as it seems to be so important for performance. Thank you @Stephen. 
That’s not very scientific though.
It might have been just one plugin causing the issue.
However, agree with Stephen that 21 is a lot!
You need to use discretion when installing a plugin. Ask yourself important questions like:
Keep them to a minimum.
Having half a dozen high quality plugins is reasonable.
But just because you can eat 21 doughnuts 
doesn’t mean you should …
