Hey everyone, I manage a small business website that focuses on restaurant insights — mainly menu updates, deals, and customer experiences for popular chains like Texas Roadhouse. I’ve been running it smoothly for over a year, but over the past month, I’ve been struggling with some serious performance and tracking issues after introducing a few updates. I recently added dynamic content sections (for daily offers and location-based info) and started seeing random slowdowns, delayed page loads, and even a few full site crashes.
The first issue I noticed was that the homepage would sometimes take 8–10 seconds to load. When I checked through Chrome’s DevTools, it showed that some JavaScript files were taking unusually long to fetch. I thought it might be related to my analytics scripts (Google Analytics and a heatmap tool), so I disabled them temporarily but the load time barely improved. Then I looked at my server logs and saw a series of timeout errors related to image delivery and an API I use for pulling restaurant locations.
Another problem is that my analytics data has become unreliable. Pageview counts are fluctuating heavily one day it shows normal traffic levels, and the next day it drops to almost zero, even though my server logs indicate consistent visits. It almost feels like something is interfering with the tracking scripts or preventing them from firing correctly. I even noticed that some referral traffic isn’t being recorded at all, which makes it really hard to measure my marketing campaigns’ effectiveness.
I’m also seeing strange CPU spikes on my hosting dashboard. When I analyze resource usage, there are moments where the load jumps dramatically even when there’s minimal traffic. I use shared hosting, but I’ve never hit the limits before. I’m starting to suspect one of the new plugins or third-party scripts I added might be causing background requests or memory leaks. I already tried deactivating most of them, yet the issue keeps reappearing randomly especially when the Texas Roadhouse menu API section is active.
I ran a Lighthouse performance audit and got some warnings about render-blocking resources and “unused JavaScript.” However, I’ve optimized most images and enabled caching through Cloudflare. Still, the biggest performance lag seems to come from embedded third-party scripts. I’d love to streamline or defer those, but I’m not entirely sure which ones are essential versus which I can safely remove without breaking site functionality.
Has anyone here dealt with similar slowdowns or analytics inconsistencies after integrating multiple third-party APIs or tracking tools? Should I consider switching hosting providers or look deeper into asynchronous loading for scripts? Any advice on diagnosing these types of mixed performance and data accuracy issues would really help especially since my site depends on accurate tracking for restaurant-related content and affiliate campaigns. SOrry for the long post!
Debugging is the hardest part of programming specially with foreign code. I can’t really help you but I have found a similar issue, the latest Yahoo Finance update that uses tons of JavaScript is as slow as molasses. Since the slowdown can be on either the server side or the user side that is the first thing you need to find out.
My advice to programmers, use the Sherlock Holmes Method, collect and analyze the facts, get the data. Don’t do anything until you find out where the problem lies.
You’ve made an excellent point about first determining whether the bottleneck is server-side or client-side. Based on what I’m seeing, it appears to be both:
On the server side, the timeout errors in my logs and those random CPU spikes suggest something is indeed overloading the server resources - likely those new dynamic content sections or API calls I mentioned.
On the client side, the Lighthouse warnings about render-blocking resources and “unused JavaScript” align with what you observed about JavaScript-heavy sites becoming sluggish. The delayed file fetches in DevTools further confirm browser-side performance issues.
Your advice about not making changes until properly diagnosing the problem is well-taken. I think my next step should be to systematically isolate variables - perhaps testing page loads with different combinations of scripts enabled/disabled, and correlating server resource usage with specific API calls or plugin activations.