For quite some time now it would take several minutes for our Central Admin to load up once opened, I decided to spend a bit of time and see what I could find to improve it.
Turned out the fix was very simple if a tad confusing as it was supposedly fixed during a cumulative update to SharePoint in August of 2012 (not that it should matter in this case)
The Issue
The issue is caused by SharePoint looking for a group called IIS_WPG, first on the local machine and then within the same domain. It then most likely waits for a timeout period before it will finally connect you to the Central Admin.
This group is not required by SharePoint 2013 in any way and seems to be a legacy thing that’s not been removed properly.
The Fix
The fix is pretty straightforward –
- Access the SharePoint front-end server.
- Go to the windows menu or open ‘Run’ depending on your OS.
- Search or run ‘lusrmgr.msc’ to open the Local Users and Groups’ manager.
- Select Groups in the left-hand navigation.
- Right-Click Group then select ‘New Group…’
- test

- Name the new group ‘WSS_WPG’ then click Create.
- close the local user and group manager then try to load the Central Admin.
- All going well it should pop up quickly now.