Diagnosing admin-ajax.php Slow Responses in WordPress

With each CMS platform comes its own unique issues that you have to troubleshoot and deal with as a web developer or business owner. While WordPress might be the most widely used CMS, with hundreds of thousands of plugins and themes available, this also can result in it being one of the trickiest to optimize correctly as there are so many different variables that could be introducing delays. If you have ever run a website speed test on your WordPress site, then you have probably encountered references to showing up in your results. Today we want to briefly explore how to better diagnose slow server responses and what your options are as a WordPress site owner. What is the admin-ajax.php File? In WordPress 3.6 the WordPress heartbeat API was introduced to allow WordPress to communicate between the web-browser and the server. It uses /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php to run AJAX calls from the web-browser to keep track of what is going on in the dashboard. For example, if you log in to your WordPress site, you will immediately see a request for admin-ajax.php in your logs. The benefits of this are improvements upon session management, revision tracking, and auto saving. WP heartbeat API from the #wordpress #smallbusiness #entrepreneur