What Makes WordPress Slow – Complete Speed Optimization Guide
If you were to look up “why is my WordPress site so slow?” in Google while your site is loading at the speed of a dial-up modem, you would not be the only one doing that.
A slow WordPress sitesare means of torture. The visitors are not the only ones who get frustrated, but also the site owner – if he/she has invested time and love in content or products. To top it all, speed is no longer a matter of only user experience. A slow site can lower your rankings, conversion rate, and even make your potential customers leave.
The page load time is one of the most important features that your website should have. A WordPress slow loading site means that the web is not done well, you will lose leads, Google traffic will drop, and it will come down to your business of losing money. If you have noticed that page loading time is an issue and have asked yourself why is my WordPress site so slow, you should take action right away.
Discovering the reason why your site is taking longer than usual to load and putting in place the correct solutions will not only help you keep but also improve your rankings.
How Can You Tell That A WordPress Site Is Slow? You can’t keep asking yourself a question like what slows down my WordPress site and then check the loading time yourself immediately. The loading speed of your site can be checked by entering its URL in Google’s Page Speed Insights. The analysis will then be provided. In essence, the loading speed that Google considers to be the best is the one that is under 2s.
In eCommerce cases, Google says:
“The two seconds limit is where eCommerce websites are considered acceptable. At Google, we are aiming for less than half a second.”
Thanks to this, many research studies have come out with the same conclusion: If your website takes more than 4s to load, then one out of every four visitors will go elsewhere. It has been figured out that the average human attention span is 7s now which is 3s less than the previous 12s which have been the average for the years up to 2000.
But, there is also good news: you can actually speed up your WordPress site. From choosing the right hosting provider to optimizing images and plugins we will cover all the important aspects of speeding up a slow WordPress website. So, if you are willing to speed up your WordPress website then make sure to read this blog till the end.
Why is my WordPress site so slow?
If your WordPress site is running very slow, it might be due to several reasons that have a major negative impact on the user experience as well as the optimization of the site for search engines. Page speed is one of the most important technical SEO factors, which is very often mentioned by experts, that it is one of the top five issues that require immediate solving even before the start of any SEO strategy. So, the first line of investigation should be about your hosting, WordPress setup, size of the page, and any scripts running externally.
On the other hand, figuring out what causes a slow WordPress site is not very easy. Hence, each potential culprit has to be looked at thoroughly and analyzed deeply. For example, shared hosting may be limited in resources because of which loading of your site may take time even though it is more affordable. On the other hand, a wrongly set-up WordPress instance like running on an outdated PHP version can also result in performance issues.
Besides that, heavy image files and the unnecessary use of external scripts, like those from social media plugins or ad networks can make your page size very large, thus your page will load slowly. It is imperative to scrutinize these main areas for getting to the exact points that are slowing down your site. Getting to grips with these basics is the way you can start your WordPress optimization journey to have a site running at top speed.
How To Know If Your WordPress Website Is Too Slow?
If you think that your WordPress site is taking too long to load, you can verify the site’s speed in three different ways.
1. Use A Speed Testing Tool
The most convenient method to check your website’s loading speed is to employ a speed testing tool.
Some of the frequently used speed test instruments are:
Pingdom: A tool to test website performance that evaluates loading times and pinpoint bottlenecks, thus assisting in optimization which ultimately leads to an increase in speed and overall performance of the website.
GTmetrix: speed check of the site with detailed focus and providing easy-to-follow solution for that reason.
Page Speed Insights: A tool from Google for measuring the speed of a site, giving the insights and proposals to tune it for a quick and easy user experience.
You just have to enter the URL of your website in the search field and the tool will investigate your site, pulling up an analysis and a list of suggestions to upgrade your performance.
A majority of these speed testing tools come with various pricing options. You should figure out your business objectives and budget first, then choose the pricing that best suits your business.
Reasons & Solutions for a Slow WordPress Website
There are various reasons behind a slow WordPress website and the good thing is you can easily fix them by following some simple steps. Here are some of the reasons and solutions for a slow WordPress website.
Reason 1. Too Many Plugins
WordPress is a highly adaptable and flexible content management system (CMS) that is famous for its main advantage-potentiality with the plugins.
While these plugins can make a website more attractive and functional, they also bring their own set of instructions that have to be carried out each time the page is loaded. This instruction can slow down the page greatly if a number of plugins are running at the same time.
Additionally, some poorly coded plugins may unnecessarily consume server resources, thus causing the page loading time to be longer than before.
To keep the site in good shape, do not use more than what is necessary and also check if there are any plugins that may cause your WordPress site to slow down.
Solution
Check your WordPress site backend thoroughly for old plugins that you haven’t removed and active plugins that barely contribute to your site. Besides plugins being at their latest versions, by henceforth having fewer and better plugins for your WordPress site you will be directly addressing loading time and UX issues.
Reason 2. Excessive Plugin Usage
There is no doubt that plugins are great devices for adding new functionalities to your WordPress website so that it becomes more user-friendly and visually appealing. The truth is, plugins can only be beneficial if you use them correctly. Otherwise, they can be the reason why your WordPress loading speed is so slow.
Yes! It is what you think. An excessive number of plugins may lead to the decrease of the performance of your WordPress website. The reason for it is that every plugin on your site demands additional resources to run, which may result in the page loading time’s getting longer. Your WordPress site will require more memory, CPU time and background data transfers (HTTP requests) between your server and browser every time you add another plugin.
Furthermore, the speed of your site can also be hampered by plugin/software that is no longer viable or has ceased to be supported. These plugins may be compromised sets of codes that hackers can use to penetrate your website causing security breaches that can slow down your website or even lead to website downtime.
Solution
To solve issues related to the slow-down of the site’s operations due to excessive plugin usage you must first limit the number of plugins that you install on your WordPress site. First of all, what you need is only security and SEO functionalities, then after you have taken care of that, you can think about installing further plugins that support those functions.
If you remove or deactivate all the plugins that are out-of-date and have bad code, not only will you get rid of a potential source of security vulnerabilities, but your website will also become faster. Make sure that the plugin is properly coded and that it provides a real and useful feature before you start using it.
In order to refrain from putting up with defective plugins on your site, be sure that you always install the plugin from reliable sources such as the official WordPress repository. Moreover, if you want to have most of the features on your WordPress website without using too many plugins, you can install multifunctional plugins.
A multifunctional plugin is a type of software that comes with various options to do without the need to use different plugins. One of the most multifunctional plugins, which can be used as an example, is Jetpack, the one that is capable of providing your website with over 30 features, including: security, SEO, analytics in details, and so on.
Reason 3. Using a Heavy Theme
WordPress Themes are a great way for many website owners to make their sites look attractive, professional, and appealing to the eyes without the need for writing a single line of code. With a theme, you are able to conveniently put up different website elements and animations. But the question is, did you know that your theme can be the leading cause of your site’s slow loading?
Themes can play a major role in the functioning of your website. The code of a theme is one of the factors that can determine your website’s loading speed. If the code is more complex, it may take longer for your site to be loaded. Besides, this can also be because of the number of HTTP requests that are needed to load the website as well as the duration of the code execution.
Also, WordPress themes with various design elements such as pictures, videos, and animations may increase the loading time of your website. A theme that consists of many design elements may take a longer time in loading especially if the pictures or videos are not properly optimized for web use.
Moreover, the framework that a theme is built on can also determine the speed of your website. For instance, some frameworks may have unnecessary code which may lead to slow loading of the website.
Solution
You may need to think of a Lightweight WordPress theme if the slow loading of your website is caused by your currently used theme. A lightweight theme is meant for quick loading and thus your website’s loading speed will be drastically improved.
Apart from that, do not forget to get a theme install from a platform that is not only legitimate but also trusted such as the official WordPress directory. By doing this, you will be less likely to install a theme that contains bloated or malicious code in its HTML.
What can also slow down your website is the complex code of your theme leading to many HTTP requests to your site’s server which in turn results in the site being slow. To avoid the unnecessary HTTP requests to the server, you can make the requests fewer by merging the CSS and JavaScript files so that you will have only one file for each of them.
The sources in your themes such as images, videos, and animations put an unnecessary load on your site’s server thus making your site slow. To solve this problem you can shrink the media files with the help of a media compressor plugin like WP compress.
Reason 4. Unoptimized Images
If you are not optimizing the images that you put on your WordPress site, it can lead to a major page speed problem in a later time. The images in question take more space than they should if they are not optimized, thus they increase the time of the page loading.
Therefore, users will bounce from your site without conversions, which is bad for your time-on-page analytics metrics — all these can lower your Google ranking.
Solution
Use image optimization tools to optimize your images and thus improve the factors that decide your Google ranking.
What are the best tools (with prices) for image optimization?
These are the best image sizes for your WordPress site:
- Blog post image size 1200 x 630 pixels
- Header image size 1048 x 250 pixels
- Featured image size – landscape 1200 x 900 pixels
- Featured image size – portrait 900 x 1200 pixels
- WordPress background image size 1920 x 1080 pixels
- Logo image size 200 x 100 pixels
- Thumbnail image size 150 x 150 pixels
Nevertheless, image optimization is not only about the heavy images and the long loading times. To provide a smooth UX, your website should not display images that are bigger than the screen of the user, no matter if they are on a desktop or mobile.
The right image size for your WordPress will depend on a number of factors including:
Reason 5. Failure To Use A Content Delivery Network (CDN)
An essential tool in the arsenal of any WordPress site, a Content Delivery Network (CDN) is what makes it possible for the website to load fast and perform well. If you don’t have a CDN, then each time someone wants to see your website’s content, the request has to go to the main server of your site. This is what is known as a bottleneck, which is why the loading time of pages gets longer, especially when the number of visitors to your site increases. A CDN makes it possible for your website’s content to be stored on different servers that are spread worldwide.
Solution
- Amazon CloudFront CDN: Custom pricing calculators
- Sucuri: Plans from $199.99 a year
- Cloudflare: Plans from $0 to $200 a month
Use a CDN to get the pages loaded from servers that are the closest to the user.
There are a number of CDN providers that offer different kinds of plans. Custom pricing calculators are features that Amazon CloudFront has. Sucuri has plans starting at $199.99 per year, while Cloudflare offers a wide range of plans, from free ones with basic features to those with advanced features, which cost up to $200 per month. Choosing the right CDN should be based on the traffic of your site, the budget that you have, and what it is that you really need.
Reason 6. Your WordPress database is the engine behind your site.
But just like any engine, it needs maintenance. In a few years, your database becomes a storage place for a lot of junk: post revisions, spam comments, trashed posts, old transients, and so on. If you have a site that has been running for a few years and it has been frequently updated, you may not have realized but the mess can be quite significant.
Solution
Make sure that you clean and optimise your database on a regular basis.
WP-Optimize’s database optimisation tool takes away the hassle of doing it by yourself. It allows you to:
- Remove post revisions
- Clear out spam and trash
- Delete expired transients
- Defragment and optimise database tables
It is a way of cleaning your site’s backend just like you would do your house in spring. You wouldn’t let your cupboard overflow with junk – so don’t let your database do the same.
Reason 7. Unused CSS and JavaScript Code
Unused CSS and JavaScript can make a website’s loading speed slow. Each time your site is loaded, the browser has to download and process all the CSS and JavaScript files that are linked with that site. If there are files of unused CSS and JavaScript, this process might take longer.
This is because the browser has to download and process the unused CSS and JavaScript files even if they are not used. So, it extends the size of the files that have to be downloaded and consequently, your website’s loading speed is getting slower.
There is also a possibility that the unused CSS and JavaScript files can affect your site’s rendering, which can adversely affect your WordPress website’s speed and performance.
Moreover, unused CSS and JavaScript can be the reason for slow loading of websites as they can worsen the website’s code quality, making the browser’s tasks of code analysis and execution longer and thus causing slow loading times.
Solution
By using code optimization methods, you may be able to address issues relating to slow loading speed caused by CSS and JavaScript that is not utilized. Such tools will scan through your website code and identify those parts that are not in use, upon which you can delete them and thus bring the loading time of your site to a minimum.
One more option is to set up the lazy loading feature on your WordPress website. With lazy loading, non-essential elements of your site, like images, will only be loaded when needed. In this way, the amount of code that needs to be loaded is drastically reduced and the loading time of your website is increased.
The most important thing is to perform routine checks on your site’s code and continuously eliminate segments of code that are not used, including CSS and JavaScript. This will not only help in reducing both the size and the complexity of your codebase, but also lead to faster loading times as well as easier maintenance.
Reason 8. Unoptimized Media Files
Different types of media files like images, videos, and audio files could be the reason why your site is loaded slowly. This is because media files are generally larger than the other types of files such as HTML and CSS.
While loading a website, the browser does the processing and downloading of all the media files that go with the site. This puts a lot of heavy work on your site’s server, especially when there are lots of media files or files that are too large. As a result of this, the loading speed of your website is slowed down, and the visitors have to wait to see the content of your site.
Solution
It is very important to make sure that all the media that is uploaded on your website is fully optimized if you want to keep your site’s loading speed at a good level. To optimize the images that you have uploaded on your site, you may install image compression plugins like WP compress and Smush.
When you compress the image, the unnecessary load on your site’s server will be removed, and thus, your site’s loading speed will go up. Another thing that you can do is to enable the lazy loading feature on your website. It will limit the loading of the media files which are not necessary, and only load those which are being displayed on your lifestyle visitor’s screen.
In the case of video files, it is better not to upload them directly to your website as they will take up a lot of your server space. Instead, why not embed them on your website? That way you get to keep your visitors happy with their requested video content while your site’s loading speed remains intact.
How does a slow-loading WordPress site affect your site?
Simply put, when your WordPress website is slow to load, it can cause a chain of problems. People who come to your site may exit it before the page has even loaded, which is not good for your bounce rate.
Slow loading websites can severely impact your search rankings, thus making it harder for you to be found online. A user that is frustrated with the situation is less likely to buy products, which means that there will be fewer sales. On top of that, it leaves a bad vibe, which can be harmful to your brand.
Moreover, slow loading times make it hard for users to go through different pages and they decide to spend less time on your site.
People using mobile devices and who are usually in a hurry, may not be able to wait. Besides, there is a possibility that slow websites may have a higher bandwidth cost and they can be a site that is going to crash when there is a lot of traffic.
FAQs
Why is my WordPress website loading so slowly?
A slow WordPress site can be attributed to various causes such as malfunctioning technically, having an excessive number of plugins, large image files, or a problem with your web hosting. It is always a good practice to keep your site updated and optimized to enhance the speed.
How to clear the cache in WordPress?
Clearing the cache is the equivalent of refreshing your site. This can be done with a caching plugin that normally provides a very simple button for cache clearance.
Is it safe to delete WordPress cache?
Sure, deleting the cache is safe. Doing this frequently can be a good idea because it allows the system to run faster since it gets rid of the old data that is no longer needed.
How can I make my WordPress site load faster?
There are several ways to speed up a WordPress site such as by image optimization, using a lightweight theme, and limiting the number of plugins. Updating your site regularly and using a caching plugin will also have positive effects.
Which plugin is best for website speed?
Airlift is a great plugin option for cache management and overall site performance improvement.
Conclusion
If your website is loading slowly and you are thinking of ways to speed up a slow WordPress site, I would suggest that you look at the most obvious problem first and then work your way down to others. It could be that you are on a bad server host, or it could be that you have too many plugins. Moreover, before we finish, it is very good to know that doing a full WordPress SEO audit can be a great help in understanding how well your online presence aligns with the top standards.
Your WordPress page that is slow to load is a problem that can be solved quite simply, so it is necessary to find the cause first. A fast WordPress site is not only the minimum requirement for having a quality website but also a great starting point for getting more traffic and visitors to it. Instead of questioning why is WordPress slow, you should be thinking more about how to carry out the solutions given in this article to make it speedy!
Slow WordPress sites can be caused by a variety of factors, such as large image files, excessive plugins, outdated software, poor hosting, and inefficient coding.