Stabilising a High-Traffic WordPress Blog with Performance Optimisation
As part of our ad-hoc WordPress support service, Toast was approached by A London Inheritance, a long-running WordPress blog struggling with frequent downtime and performance issues. The site, which hosts over 1.5 million words and 14,000+ images, was regularly hitting hosting resource limits, leading to database connection errors and periods of unavailability. The client needed fast, expert intervention to stabilise the site without a costly rebuild or hosting migration.
The Client
A London Inheritance is a long-running blog documenting London’s history with over 1.5 million words of content and 14,000+ images built up over 11 years. The site attracts a loyal readership and has more than 5,000 email subscribers via Jetpack.
The Challenge
Despite its popularity, the site was frequently experiencing downtime and poor performance.
- CPU and memory usage would spike to maximum, sometimes for over an hour.
- Readers often encountered “Error establishing a database connection.”
- The hosting provider blamed malware or cron jobs but offered little support beyond upselling security tools and hosting upgrades.
- The client needed the site stabilised so it could continue growing without costly infrastructure changes.
The Results
- The improvements were immediate:
- Resource usage dropped significantly, with long stable periods even on the busiest days.
- Downtime reduced from frequent outages to rare, short-lived spikes.
- Posts continued to go out smoothly to subscribers with no disruption.
Our client noted:
“The site is much improved… considerably improved. This was happening very frequently before your work, and has now stabilised. Yesterday, our busiest day, it was perfect. I’m very pleased with the results.”
The client was so satisfied with the work that they left a 5-star review for Toast Support.
I was having serious problems with my WordPress site. Maxing out CPU and Memory, and the site going off line. Toast identified a number of issues and fixed these over a couple of days. Very pleased with the result and the fast response from Toast.
David Sweetland
Owner
https://alondoninheritance.com/
Looking Ahead
With the foundation stabilised, our client now has the option to schedule further database optimisation and is monitoring remaining resource spikes. If needed, we can also introduce Cloudflare for additional caching and bot protection, future-proofing the blog for continued growth.
