Overview:

If you have noticed a high resource consumption, or load, on your cPanel CPU, Memory or IO recourses, then this simple guide can help with the first few troubleshooting steps to get your resource consumption back to normal.  

Monitoring your usage and check the timing:

You can monitor your resource usage in cPanel using the "Resource Usage tool".   For more information on how this can be done, you can follow our guide.  Using the details from this tool,  you can determine the times when resource consumption is high and see if it is linked to something happening on your site.  For example, more traffic could be due to an advertisement campaign, or it could be due to a specific change that was made on the site such as an update or new plugin or a scheduled event such as a backup or cron job.

Managing website caching:

If you have not already done so, investigating caching options can be a big improvement to most websites. Caching solutions will store static versions of your website in a cache. This allows sites to skip running heavier scripts every time your site loads. The caching process helps to improve speed and performance, and the overall user experience.

Investigating legitimate vs illegitimate traffic to your website:

It’s possible that high resource consumption is caused by higher-than-usual traffic to your site.  In order to investigate this, you will want to use an application or plugin to monitor the traffic on your website such as Google Analytics.  Using the details gathered you can determine if an upgrade is required on the site, or if the traffic is not legitimate and can block bad actors via IP address.

Optimising your website:

There are a few things that can help with optimising your website. We always suggest contacting your web developer to review the website to optimise any code within the files. You can also run a repair on your database using the "phpMyAdmin" tool in cPanel which can clear out some unnecessary data easily.  If your site is using WordPress, ensure that your plugins are up-to-date and that you have disabled any plugins that may not be necessary on your site.