WordPress Admin Running Slow? Here’s How To Fix It!

I update my WordPress Network quite often. Especially to prevent security issues. Load time for typical WordPress pages is as good as perfect. However, I discovered on some of my WordPress Network setups the wp-admin pages suddenly took forever to load. I was waiting 2 minutes to load any wp-admin page. After a long search I discovered the problem was a faulty db_version value in the wp_options table.

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I usually auto update my sites and found out this value was not updated (or could not be updated automatically).

WordPress Codex pages (http://codex.wordpress.org/Version_3.6) list this value for every WordPress version. For example: Version 3.6 has database version 24448. Thus, you should update this value manually in your mySQL database: change db_version (option_name) in wp_options to 24448 (for version 3.6). You should repeat this for every site in your wordpress network (wp_2_options, wp_3_options, …).

It’s as ‘simple’ as that!

17 thoughts on “WordPress Admin Running Slow? Here’s How To Fix It!”

  1. I think you meant to change the version from 24448 to 22448. However, everytime I make the change in mysql, I get a “Datebase Update Required” page on my site and I have to update the database – which rewrites the db_version back to 24448.

    1. Hi Matt,
      Wordpress codex says

      For Version 3.6, the database version (db_version in wp_options) changed to 24448, and the Trac revision was r24973.

      I didn’t experience the database upgrade message you encountered. Are you sure you are using 3.6.x?

        1. Matt, I double checked and I’m using db_version 24448 in combination with WordPress 3.6.1 coming from initial_db_version 21115. (It’s a network setup with 3 different blogs)

  2. You are a lifesaver man!

    I’ve been pulling my hair off for a month now due to extreme slowdown in my WP MU sites. Whew! Can’t believe that’s all I need! 🙂

    Why there’s not a lot of info about it.
    Thank you! Thank you!

  3. Awesome post. This solved our problems. Not sure how the db_version got out of sync but it does seem to solve the problem. Not sure if there was an update that failed and didn’t update the ddl/metadata for the individual sites or not.

  4. I was experiencing this slow admin issue running WP 4.4.1, Woocommerce 2.5.1 and found the culprit to be my Stamps.com plug-in. Disabling the Stamps.com plug-in fixed the speed issue. Just today a new update was released from plug-in author for Stamps.com that fixed the plug-in so I can reactivate it without slow down.

  5. I hope this helps. We have 2 woocommerce shops and we are loosing lots of time (and money) for 2 years now because of the slow backend. When we have the solution I’ll let know.

    1. Pleeeeaaase help me, tell me what fixed it for you, I can’t really figure out what’s wrong.

  6. You are a pure genius. My WordPress-based multi-site control panel area now flies like a jet. Thank you Sir!

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