You have done everything you could to optimize your PHP website performance.
As a good webmaster, you have gone through the code, disable poorly-coded plugins and even reinstall the CMS software but, still unable to determine why all your efforts are not being rewarded.
The thing is that performance issues can be because of:
- sluggish and poorly-coded plugins
- slow database queries
- poorly-written code functionality
- external calls
- slow APIs
- and even possibly spikes in website traffic.
Without dedicated tracing tools that easily plug into your CMS and analyze the site to help you identify the root cause, trouble-shooting this might be like shooting in the wind and hoping something will stick.
Today, we want to draw your attention to a tool we recently integrated called PHP X-Ray.
PHP X-Ray (located in the Software pane) is a tool you can use to monitor and diagnose performance in content management systems (CMS) applications such as WordPress, Joomla, or Drupal easily without affecting uptime.
So instead of tediously combing through web application code and plugins, you can scan your website, identify performance bottlenecks in case of a slow website and resolve them swiftly.
How To Use PHP X-Ray To Find Issues
For accounts or hosting packages with PHP X-Ray enabled, all you need to do is to:
Log in to your cPanel and scroll down to Software.
Click on PHP X-Ray and when the page loads, create a tracing task.
If you are unable to see PHP X-Ray in Jupiter, please change your theme to paper_lantern.
You need to specify the site URLs or domains that have performance issues by selecting the domain from the drop-down list.
To specify URL or wildcard, end-users should use the input field next to the domain.
The URL option should be a valid URL of the domain that exists on your current hosting account.
The field supports wildcard matching. Click How to use special characters to learn more about wildcard matching.
If the application is installed on the main domain, you can
Click Run.
Then visit the site and perform an action.
For instance, you can submit a form on the site to perform a POST request, which will trigger PHP X-Ray data collection.
Now return to the tracing dashboard to review feedback.
You will see the task in the list of tracing tasks.
PHP X-Ray will sort requests by order of the slowest requests at the top so that you can prioritize issues.
View the Details page to get additional information about the performance issue and feedback on the root cause.
For example, if a WordPress plugin uses extensive resources for the request, you will find the details on this page.
All you have to do is to disable the plugin in the CMS administrative dashboard.
Revisit the site, and performance should improve.
The Details page in the trace dashboard should also show no performance issues.
We hope that this will help you optimize your website without the need to spend a fortune on doing just that.
Limitations:
- PHP X-Ray plugin does not support creating continuous tasks.
- You have a limit of tracing tasks running at a time. Before starting the next task, you should wait for the completion of the previous ones or forcefully stop the running ones. Otherwise, you will get an error.
- Our technical team cannot run the tracing task for the same Domain/URL when you are doing so at the same time.
- If continuous tracing is enabled for the domain, you will not be able to create a new task for this domain because the same rule works - it will be a duplicate of the existing tracing tasks.
PHP X-Ray is available to all accounts till September 14th.
After the date, AdaptiveOrigin customers have to upgrade their accounts to use the optimization tool.
