Performance of your website, especially when using a CMS or framework, may often tax your server to the point it bogs down or throws fatal “out of memory” errors. It’s often hard to troubleshoot these issues because sometimes the server runs out of memory before it can even report the error, or the error it throws is in a log file that’s not readily accessible. Depending on your type of host, this can waste a lot of your time just hunting down the error, much less actually trying to solve the reason it is erroring out in the first place.

Before you try anything else, increase the WordPress PHP memory allocation, you probably shouldn’t go past ‘256M’ (that’s megabytes), but you may also want to check with your host. Caching and improving the speed of your website will not only improve your SEO rankings, it will also help you retain more traffic. Let’s face it, people are looking for information and they don’t want to wait, staring at that spinning beach ball or Window’s “blue ring of futility” — I’m sure you can relate. We all have better things to do than sit at red lights, right?!

Turning on the built-in WordPress cache can speed things up. I’d suggest loading something more robust, like “WP Super Cache” but some shared hosts will not allow it.

The WP_CACHE setting included in the wp-content/advanced-cache.php script, when executing wp-settings.php: