Why is my WordPress Site so slow?
WordPress is a highly effective content creation technology that has swept the globe.
In actuality, more than 75 million websites have been made using the platform. You’ll need a few WordPress plugins, themes, and other tools, just like with any other website construction tools, to make everything appear beautiful and let your branding stand out. Unfortunately, regardless of your content management system, these tools can make things take longer. So how can WordPress performance be improved?
Fortunately, there are approaches to accelerate your website. You may quickly speed things up by managing your themes, pictures, plugins, and other content in the right way.
Just keep in mind that before a consumer can fully appreciate your page, every content management system will need to load all connected stuff, whether it’s displayed on the page or operating in the background. You might be wondering at this point how fast your page loads affect how users feel about it.
Unfortunately, if your page loads slowly, they might not be doing anything as all.
Table of content
- Why is site speed important?
- Tips to speed up your WordPress site: Solutions to the question why is my WordPress site so slow?
- Choose a quality web hosting
- Keep your site up to date
- Choose a speed-optimized theme
- Optimize your database
- Use optimized images
- Enable page caching
- Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
- Minify CSS and JS files
- Deactivate unused plugins
- Don’t upload audio/video directly to your site
- Add LazyLoad to your images
- Enable HTTPS and HTTP/2
- Final words on WordPress speed
Why is site speed important?
The days of a dial-up modem’s nostalgic shrieking indicate that your page will finally load a thing of the past.
Nowadays, users expect websites to load quickly. In fact, 40% of users said that if a website took longer than three seconds to load, they would leave.
Having a quick WordPress site is the finest thing you can do for your company. You will surely lose money and traffic if you don’t do this.
This is a result of online users’ sporadic impatience. In fact, more than half of all mobile users admit to having abandoned a page due to its sluggish loading speed.
It’s also worth noting that websites with loading speeds of 1-2 seconds see conversion rates nearly three times higher than those that load in 5-10 seconds.
Even worse, if your websites load slowly, this may make it impossible for potential customers to find you at all.
By July 2018, page speed will be taken into account by Google when determining search results for mobile devices. This implies that a slow website will hurt your SEO ranking.
Now is the perfect opportunity to discover how to make WordPress sites load faster.
Tips to speed up your WordPress site: Solutions to the question why is my WordPress site so slow?
After checking your site speed, if it takes more than 2 seconds to load, immediately take steps to make it faster than it was. Here we have mentioned 15 tips that can definitely improve your site speed if you take them seriously.
- Choose a quality web hosting
- Keep your site up to date
- Choose a speed-optimized theme
- Optimize your database
- Use optimized images
- Enable page caching
- Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
- Minify CSS and JS files
- Deactivate unused plugins
- Don’t upload audio/video directly to your site
- Add LazyLoad to your images
- Enable HTTPS and HTTP/2
Choose a quality web hosting
Your website’s speed is just one of many crucial performance-related factors that your Web hosting company and hosting plan can greatly influence.
The majority of WordPress providers provide numerous hosting options:
- Shared Hosting
- Dedicated hosting
- Virtual private server (VPS) hosting
- Managed WordPress hosting plans
Generally speaking, when selecting a WordPress hosting package, you get what you paid for.
However, with shared hosting, numerous other customers share the server resources with you.
This implies that if your adjacent website experiences high traffic, it may affect the performance of the entire server, which will slow down your website.
On the other hand, using a managed WordPress hosting service gives you the most optimized server configurations to run WordPress. Managed WordPress hosting companies also offer automatic backups, automatic WordPress updates, and more advanced security configurations to protect your website.
Established websites with more content and higher levels of regular traffic should find a dedicated, managed hosting, or VPS hosting plan from a reputable provider. These plans will allocate enough server resources to handle increased traffic without affecting load time.
Keep your site up to date
As a very much kept up with open source project, WordPress is refreshed habitually. Each update won’t just offer new elements however it will likewise fix security issues and bugs. Your WordPress topic and modules might have customary updates, as well.
As a website owner, it’s your responsibility to use,
- WordPress updated version
- Updated PHP version
- HTML latest version
- Updated WordPress Themes & Plugins.
Always be running the latest versions of these things to optimize performance, keep your site secure, patch bugs, and ensure every feature and tool functions as it should.
Choose a speed-optimized theme
There are many shiny and beautiful themes in the WordPress market. But don’t forget, themes with a lot of dynamic content, widgets, slider, sidebar, etc., can cause your hosting server to respond slowly.
Rather than opting for a feature-rich theme (which involves a lot of code that has to be loaded every time someone visits your site), take a minimal approach by using a theme that contains the bare bones of what is necessary to function well.
Be careful when purchasing themes on popular marketplaces. When you choose a theme, check the page speed of the theme’s demo. Then decide whether it is purchasable or not.
Optimize your database
WordPress autosaving everything is a good sign, but the downside is that your database can quickly fill up with thousands of post revisions, trackbacks, pingbacks, unapproved comments, and deleted items.
Cleaning the database can be done manually using phpMyAdmin, but it can be difficult and harmful if you don’t know what you’re doing. Unless you’re a tech genius, it’s safer to install a plugin to perform this task.
Plugins such as WP-Optimize, Advanced Database Cleaner, and WP-Sweep can help optimize your database.
These plugins regularly empty your database recycle bin to keep your database efficient and fill only what you need to keep. Of course, always back up first when doing anything with the database.
Use optimized images
Images are essential to attracting website visitors. Your website may contain a lot of beautiful images, but it’s a good idea to optimize those images for faster page load times. There are several ways to optimize your images, including compressing your images, adding alt text and titles, and creating an image sitemap.
You can use WordPress plugins for automatic image compression. WP Smush is a free plugin that automatically compresses images when you upload them to your media library. All compression is “lossless”. In other words, you will not see any difference in image quality.
You can do it manually if you don’t want to use an image compression plugin. You can use Photoshop or other image editing tools to minimize image size. Alternatively, you can compress the image using an online tool such as Tiny PNG.
Enable Page Caching
One of the answers to Why is my WordPress site so slow is to enable page caching.
WordPress pages are “dynamic.” on every occasion a visitor requests a web page from a non-cached website online, the hypertext preprocessor on your WordPress server has to retrieve all of the applicable content material out of your WordPress database, gather it into an HTML file, and ship that document to the customer.
This technique has its blessings, together with saving server area and allowing for dynamic website content material. But, it also takes more time and strength than sending a pre-written net page. One of the maximum popular strategies to resolve this difficulty is using a cache plugin. A caching plugin will keep the final view of your web page for any destination traffic. Because of this, your WordPress has to generate it for every following man or woman viewing the website online.
Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
A CDN leads to faster page load times because when configured, your website will use an optimized server that’s closest to your site visitor. The data center will store static content and files, and then deliver them to users based on their location.
This can help reduce external HTTP requests because the static content is already ready to go instead of requesting tons of HTTP at once.
You can use,
- Incapsula – Free CDN Provider
- Cloudflare
- CDN Enabler – WordPress Plugin
to set up your CDN. Though setting up a CDN can take a few hours, it’s usually one of the quickest ways to dramatically improve page-loading speed.
Minify CSS, HTML, and JS files
Minification of resources means removing unnecessary characters from your HTML, JavaScript, and CSS that are not required to load, such as:
- White space characters
- New line characters
- Comments
- Block delimiters
This speeds up your load times as it reduces the amount of code that has to be requested from the server.
There are plugins to help you to minify your CSS, HTML, and JS file.
- Better WordPress Minify
- Autoptimize
Deactivate unused plugins & themes
Removing unused plugins and themes will speed up your WordPress site. Find plugins and themes you no longer use. If you’re not using a particular plugin, it may be doing unnecessary work in the background. It may be time to cut back.
To remove unused plugins, you must first disable them. You can then go to the list of inactive plugins and remove plugins you no longer need.
To remove unwanted themes, go to Appearance > Themes and remove themes you no longer use.
Don’t upload audio/video directly to your site
Upload your audio and video files directly to your WordPress site and they will automatically display in the HTML5 player. But you should never do that!
It significantly increases the loading time of your website. Instead of uploading the audio and video directly (if needed), embedding the link works perfectly.
WordPress has a built-in video embedding feature, so if you copy the video URL and paste it directly into your post, it will be automatically embedded.
Add LazyLoad to your images
Lazy loading is the concept of deferring the loading of object units until they are needed. In WordPress, this usually means not loading the object until the user scrolls down the page or uses an on-click event. You can load any type of content, from images to videos to commenting systems.
For lazy loading images, there is a great free little plugin called BJ Lazy Load. This plugin replaces all post images, post thumbnails, gravatar images, and content frames with placeholders and loads the content when the browser approaches her window when a visitor scrolls the page. It also works with text widgets.
To lazy load videos, there is a free plugin called Lazy Load for Videos. Replace embedded YouTube and Vimeo videos with clickable thumbnails. If your site makes extensive use of videos, this plugin alone can dramatically speed up WordPress.
Enable HTTPS and HTTP/2
The web has used HTTP 1.1 for a very long time. It was in need of an update! HTTP/2 has many performance enhancements over HTTP 1.1 like multiplexing, server push, header compression, and others.
In order to run HTTP/2, you must run HTTPS on your site with an SSL certificate installed.
It boosts your WordPress site speed along with ensuring the security of your site.
Final words on WordPress speed
Now you know how to improve the speed of your WordPress site to fix your slow website and make it super fast. Try these out to speed up your WordPress.
Some of the tips we’ve shared for improving your WordPress speed may be ones you’re already using. In that case, you’re already on your way, but try the other tips we mentioned that you haven’t practiced on your site. You might get the answer to why is my WordPress Site so slow from any of these solutions.
If you follow the steps, you are more likely to get great results in your website loading speed and WordPress performance. A better loading page means a better user experience, and a better user experience can generate higher revenue. So never underestimate the importance of website speed.