Steps to Perform When Your WordPress Site is Slow

Why is WordPress slow? 

There are many possible answers to this complex question. It can be your web server. Perhaps there is a rogue plugin. Perhaps you're employing too many out-of-optimized photos.

It's too early to say right now, but after reading this piece, you'll know a lot more about the reasons behind your WordPress site's slowness and what you can do to speed it up.

We'll discuss the things that might cause WordPress to lag in this post. Then, in four easy stages, we'll assist you in determining whether your web server is providing the performance you want. Now let's get to work!

The following are the most typical causes of a slow-loading WordPress website:

• Slow or poor quality hosting that doesn't match your level or traffic or site

• No caching or caching plugins in place

• Your website receives a lot of traffic, but it lacks a content delivery network (CDN) to lighten the hosting strain.

• No image compression or HUGE pages

• You're not making use of the HTTP2 protocol or HTTPS.

• The PHP version you are using is outdated or ancient.

• Your plugins are outdated or sluggish.

Why should you speed up WordPress?

Nothing prompts me to hit the "back" button while visiting new websites more than a sluggish webpage. And I’m pretty sure I’m not alone here — site performance greatly impacts the user experience and largely shapes how visitors judge the quality of an online business.

When it comes to page speed and patience, there is minimal margin for mistake. Google says that it should load in two seconds or less on your website. Visitors become disinterested if they stay any longer. Page performance is also a ranking factor used by search engines including Google. Your chances of securing the coveted top place in the SERP are higher the faster your site is.

Now, WordPress doesn't exactly focus on speed from the beginning. This is mostly because of the way WordPress operates: WordPress creates a page for a visitor to your website dynamically by gathering information from several sources, such as your WordPress database and theme files, and integrating it into an HTML file that is delivered to the visitor's browser. This kind of "on the fly" page creation isn't always the best for performance.

Even when you're not actively utilising WordPress themes and plugins on your website, they nonetheless use up important server resources. A web server that has too many processes operating at once may get overloaded, slow down your sites, and discourage conversions.

As we'll soon discover, there are a number of very non-technical ways to speed up WordPress, as well as ways that need you to install plugins or even modify some code yourself—that is, if you know what you're doing. After following even a couple of these recommendations, you could even start to see changes.

There's no time to hesitate, so let's get started.

1. Identify The Source of Slowness

First, figure out if the sluggish loading website is coming from WordPress or your web host. To check how quickly your website loads, use a site speed test tool like GTmetrix or Pingdom. Verify whether it affects the entire website or simply the front page.

2. Upgrade Your Hosting Plan

Upgrade to a higher hosting plan with more RAM, faster CPUs, and more bandwidth if your present one isn't enough to manage the demand. High-traffic websites perform better with dedicated and VPS hosting.

3. Enable Caching Plugins

A caching plugin stores static copies of your site pages and serves those to visitors instead of building the page from scratch each time. This reduces processing load and speeds up performance vastly. Test plugins like WP Rocket, WP Fastest Cache or LiteSpeed Cache.

4. Optimize Your Database

An overloaded database that is slow to fetch content can drag down site speed. Optimizing the database by cleaning up bloated tables, adding indexes and upgrading to faster SSD storage can help.

5. Minify Resources

Minifying CSS, JavaScript and HTML resources reduces their file size which enables faster loading. Use a plugin like Autoptimize or enable the in-built WordPress minification.

6. Compress Images

Compressing and resizing large images to appropriate sizes saves bandwidth and boosts load times. Use EWWW Image Optimizer or SimilarWeb plugins.

7. Upgrade to PHP 7+

Upgrading your site to the latest PHP version allows it to utilize the performance improvements in the new engines. At least upgrade to PHP 7.2+ for faster load times.

Following these best practices routinely can help keep your WordPress site performant even with increasing visitors and content volume. Reach out for expert help if these self-troubleshooting steps don't suffice.