Dashboard takes too long to load or won’t load at all
your WordPress dashboard takes 30+ seconds to load — or fails to load entirely — and Tickera is the suspected culprit. The cause is usually the Ticket Store at a Glance dashboard widget recomputing stats over a very large orders table on every dashboard load.
Why it happens
Tickera ships with a Ticket Store at a Glance widget that displays quick stats — recent orders, total sales, top events. It computes these stats fresh on every dashboard request, which on a small store is instant. On a large store with tens of thousands of orders, the SQL query takes long enough to dominate the page render time.
The fix: disable the widget
If your dashboard still loads (slowly)
- Open WordPress admin → Dashboard (wait it out).
- Click Screen Options in the top-right.
- Uncheck Ticket Store at a Glance.
- The widget hides, dashboard becomes instant.
This is a per-user setting — each admin user has their own dashboard layout, so each who experiences the slowness should disable it for themselves.
If the dashboard doesn’t load at all
Edit wp-config.php (via FTP/SFTP or your host’s file manager) and add this line near the top:
define( 'TC_HIDE_STATS_WIDGET', true );
This globally disables the widget for everyone — bypassing the load and letting the dashboard render.
Other causes worth ruling out
If disabling the widget doesn’t fix it, the slowness is something else:
- Other plugins. Deactivate plugins one by one until the dashboard becomes fast — the last one you deactivated is your culprit. Common offenders: SEO plugins doing audits, backup plugins listing recent backups, analytics plugins fetching data on every dashboard load.
- Corrupted .htaccess. Rename your
.htaccessto.htaccess.bak, visit your site to regenerate. If speed returns, your old .htaccess had rules causing the slowdown. - Hosting resource limits. Shared hosts cap PHP execution, memory, CPU. If you’re consistently hitting limits, upgrade or move to managed WordPress hosting.
- Caching not set up. An object cache (Redis or Memcached) cuts dashboard load times dramatically on large sites. See configuring caching plugins.
- Browser DevTools → Network tab. See which request is slow. If it’s
admin-ajax.phptaking 20+ seconds, that pinpoints which plugin is making the call.
Going forward
For very large stores (50,000+ orders), we recommend disabling the widget permanently and using dashboard widgets selectively. Reports and stats are still available from Tickera → Reports on demand — no need to compute them on every dashboard load.
Related
Was this article helpful?
Yes — great. No or partially? Tell us what was missing — we read every message and use it to improve these docs.