Have a website that I am trying to streamline due to some server limits being hit, so I'm looking at code improvements and plugins in particular.

I have been running Wordfence premium on the site for a few years, though I'm not too sure what value it really provides.

A year ago I also put CloudFlare in front of the site as we were experiencing a large amount of bot traffic.

Do these two services overlap in terms of what they provide? Does Wordfence give me much benefit? I installed Wordfence following a hack on another website kind of blindly - following searching for things like 'how to improve wordpress security'.

Does it provide me any real value as I never really look at it. The main actual usable benefit is that it emails me a warning when a plugin is out of date.

I have a site that has been running out of memory on the server:

Log message:

[04-Aug-2026 16:01:05] WARNING: [pool mywebsite.com] server reached max_children setting (13), consider raising it[04-Aug-2026 16:01:05] WARNING: [pool mywebsite.com] server reached max_children setting (13), consider raising it 

Does anyone know how to go about diagnosing the cause of this?

A bit about the website:

• Wordpress block theme
• 1.3M visitors in past 12 months
• News website publishing avg. 450 posts per month
• Accessed and used all day by about 15 editors and marketing users
• Lots of plugins (20+ active) including:
  • Ad Inserter
  • Advanced Custom Fields
  • Conditional Blocks Pro
  • Default Featured Image
  • EWWW Image Optimizer
  • GDPR Cookie Compliance
  • Missed Scheduled Posts Publisher
  • OneSignal Push Notifications
  • Perfmatters
  • Rank Math SEO
  • Site Kit by Google
  • Social Sharing Block
  • Wordfence
  • WP Mail SMTP
  • WP Popular Posts
  • WPCodeBox 2
  • WPForms
  • WPForms Campaign Monitor

This is the only site I have which has so much going on and is also so heavily used and visited.

I'm interested to learn how to start diagnosing performance issues generally and any insight anyone can give as to how to do that would be much appreciated.