Your WordPress website is your business hub. If it is slow, you are getting less business from the website. Less business activity means less profit. You don’t want that, do you?
Therefore, it is important to understand why your WordPress website is slow and what can you do to improve its overall performance.
In this article, we will discuss some of the most common reasons that make a WordPress website slow and how you can easily improve the site speed as and when needed.
But first thing first…
Why is a WordPress Website Slow?
A WordPress website can be slow because of several reasons. The most common reason is a slow hosting solution. Since most businesses still use a shared hosting solution, their websites end up slow.
However, there are other common reasons associated with the website itself such as the server response time, site cache, page and image size, long and unnecessary code, and useless scripts and plugins.
All these increase the time it takes for a page to load on the client browser. As a result, the wait period is long and visitors start bouncing off the website.
Drawbacks of Slow Websites
- Higher bounce rate
- Lower average time per session
- Increased page size
- Decrease in search rankings
- Decrease visitor count
- Direct impact on business bottom line i.e. less profit
Top Solutions to Common WordPress Problems
Here are some of the best solutions to increase the performance of your slow WordPress website.
Hosting is Slow. Move to Cloud
Check what type of hosting solution you are using for your WordPress website. If it is a shared hosting solution, change it immediately to either a Virtual Private Server (VPS) or a Cloud hosting solution. Both of these are comparatively faster than a shared hosting solution. Moreover, you will have all the resources to yourself and no other website on the same server will be sharing your resources.
Today, most cloud hosting solutions offer enterprise-level CDN and even guarantee top-page performance for their users.
Some decent hosting solutions you can use for your business website include Kinsta, WPEngine, Cloudways, and various others.
Page Size is Large
Another obvious reason your WordPress website is slow is because of the overall size of each page. You can check the page size through tools like Pingdom and GTMetrix. Both of these tools will load your page on their servers and tell the accurate size of all elements on it.
The image posted above is of a Pingdom testing tool. As you can see the page size is less than 250kbs. This is an ideal size for a website page. It loads even on a dial-up internet connection easily. And users who are on the 2G network can also view the website without any wait.
Too Many Scripts on Site
Another major reason for slow website speed is having too many scripts on the website. If your website is in a similar situation, perhaps it is time to let go of them.
You can use defer JavaScript loading on your website to delay the loading of scripts on the page. If you have too many scripts on the page, the site will take longer to load.
To defer page loading through Google Tag Manager, simply put the scripts after ‘DOMContentLoad’ or ‘Window.Load’
This is an example of how you can defer the page loading of the website without digging down into site code.
No Caching Plugin
Caching plugins are essential for any website. Not having a cache plugin on the website can considerably decrease page performance. You can use cache plugins like W3 Total Cache, WP Rocket, NitroPack, or even the Cloudflare CDN Cache.
All of these are available through a plugin and can be easily installed on your WordPress website. Simply cache the page content including HTML, JS, and CSS so that it can load on the browser faster.
No CDN Added
Another reason your website is slow when accessed from destinations far away from the source server is that it doesn’t have a CDN service enabled.
You can use Cloudflare or Stackpath to enable enterprise CDN service for your website. Cloudflare is completely free for basic-level CDN cache. It also offers analytics and 200+ edge servers for content delivery. StackPath doesn’t have a free version at this time nor is their service price mentioned on the site. So, contact them to learn more about their pricing.
Bloat on Website
If your website has junk content on it then it is time to reduce that. Bloat can cause less relevant pages and content to be indexed in search engines. Moreover, bloat increases page size. So, in both cases you need to get rid of it fast. What does bloat look like? Bloat looks like anything from User Generated Content (UGC) to orphaned or low-quality pages.
Do a complete site audit to know if your website has bloat on it. Clean comments, pingbacks, and orphaned pages from the site.
You can use the Bulk Comment Removal tool to clean comment bloat from the WordPress site as well.
Database is Not Optimized
If the site database is not optimized, it will take more time for the site to load on the client browser. You can optimize the database using a plugin called WP Optimize. The plugin lets users easily scale their website databases. It is free to use and anyone who is not familiar with code editing can also use the database optimization plugin easily. The code will clean the database of pingbacks, unnecessary comments, excessive revisions of each post, and similar other content that has become bloated and causing problems in optimal site performance.
Too Many Unused Active Plugins
Having too many activated plugins on the website means having too many scripts running on the site pages, Plugins add scripts to the site and they can cause delays in site loading.
The first thing you need to do to remove unused plugins is disable them. Once they are disabled, check the site performance using GTMetrix or Pingdom tool. You don’t have to delete them all if they will come in handy in the future. Just keep them disabled on the website and they won’t cause any harm.
On average, a website should not have more than 10 to 15 plugins on it. Although there are too many plugins available, a plugin for everything, you can achieve most of the tasks without a single plugin. This includes adding scripts in the header and footer, deleting comments, etc.
Unnecessary HTML, JS, and CSS
Unnecessary code on the website can cause many problems including slow loading time, site crashes, and even security loopholes. That is why it is important to have a professional theme installed on the website.
If you have unnecessary code on the site, you can reduce it by using a cache plugin. Use the cache plugin to minify JS, CSS, and HTML. Once done, you will be able to easily increase the site performance and make it rank faster.
Images are Not Optimized
Is your website having too many large images? Images are bandwidth eaters. If your page has a few images more than 500kbs in size, then that will be around 3MB to 4MB. Now the whole page size would be 5MB+. This is INSANE!
You don’t want the users to wait ages for the website to load.
That is why your images must be properly optimized for site performance.
How do you optimize your site images? Well, you can use PhotoShop or an image optimization plugin like WPSmush. The plugin automatically reduces the size of images that are uploaded to WordPress.
Bonus Point: Too Many Redirects
Last but not least, if you have too many redirects set up on the website pages, then they will take a lot more time to load.
Why?
When a person visits the first page, they will be redirected to the second page. Each page will take a few seconds to load. Now combine the two pages and that will be around 10 seconds for the user to reach the actual destination.
This is again too much time. You recommended page load time should be less than 3 seconds.
How do you fix this problem? Find out what pages are getting redirected using Screaming Frog. Disable the redirections and then add relevant content (if it exists).
If your website is having endless loops due to bad redirection setup, fix that through the .htaccess file. You can use the .htaccess file to add a new redirection to the right URL from
Www addresses, HTTP addresses, and any other addresses that should be redirected to reach the actual site pages.
Bottom-line
These are some of the best ways to solve common WordPress problems that slow the website. We hope that you now have enough information to improve your site performance. If you are still unsure how to improve site performance, then comment below and we will answer your query.
