Do you wonder why your WordPress website has a slow loading speed? Well, there can be various factors that can affect the loading speed of your website. In this article, we will be discussing 7 major probable cause and solutions for slow WordPress website like yours.
Why Website Speed Matters?
In this digitalized and fast-paced era, no one has patience and people want tasks to get done quickly. The same goes for internet users, hence if your website has a slow loading speed then it might irritate the users and make them leave your website.
This will increase your site bounce rate and decrease the engagement rate on your WordPress website. In addition, this will also affect all SEO efforts taken by you to boost the search engine rankings of your website.
Since all search engines such as Google give priority to websites with a fast and optimized loading speed in the SERPs, you will miss out on a chance to appear on the top pages of SERPs if your website has a slow loading speed.
These are some of the reasons why it is important that you optimize the loading speed of your website in order to improve your online presence and provide your web traffic with a good surfing experience.
How to Check the Speed of Your Website?
Before, heading to reasons and solutions for a slow WordPress website, let’s take a look at ways through which you can check your site’s speed. So, you can track the progress after the speed optimization.
To check the speed of your site, you use online tools such as GTmetrix, and Google PageSpeed Insights. Simply visit one of these tools, enter the URL of your website in the text box, and then click on the enter button to run a speed test on your website.
It will display your site’s speed across various devices such as desktops, mobile phones, tablets, laptops, etc.
In addition to that, it will also show you the reasons why you have a slow WordPress website, and suggest some solutions to tackle those performance issues.
Probable Causes and Solutions for Slow WordPress Websites
Now, that you have gotten an idea about monitoring and checking your site’s speed, Let’s take a look at all the probable causes and solutions for a slow WordPress website, one by one.
Too Many WordPress Plugins
WordPress Plugins allow you to add various additional functions to a website. The additional functionalities can be related to security, appearance, or for SEO purposes. These features provided by plugins tend to help give a professional look to your website.
However, to get the extra benefits of those features of plugins, some website owners tend to add multiple plugins to their websites. While it surely equips your website with new features, it comes at a cost for slow WordPress Websites.
This is because too many plugins put pressure on the server and take a lot of its processing power. It leads to additional HTTP responses and increases the loading time every time a visitor tries to visit your website.
Solution
To avoid getting slow WordPress website speed, it is important to limit your plugin usage. You can do this by ensuring, to only install plugins that are necessary and give priority to ones that onboard essential functions to your website.
Do also Keep in mind to delete unused or outdated plugins, as it will reduce the number of plugins and processing time for the server to load the elements from your website.
To find out the plugins that are slowing down your WordPress website, you can simply deactivate each plugin one by one and reload the site simultaneously.
This way, you will be able to detect the plugins that are impacting the performance of your website.
The above process might feel lengthy and time-consuming if you have a ton of plugins installed on your website. In that scenario, you can rely on WordPress plugin performance analyzer tools to detect slow plugins.
Query monitor is one of the best plugin performance analyzers that assist you to keep a track of script issues, database errors, and multiple HTTP errors. It helps you to track if all these issues are caused by a plugin installed on your site.
N.B: Query monitors provide you with a lot of technical data hence you need to be tech-savvy to get the best out of it.
To avoid a slow WordPress website due to multiple plugins, you can consider installing a plugin equipped with multiple features.
WordPress Jetpack plugin is one of the best plugins that offers multiple functions to your website. This plugin enriches your site with great performance, security, design tools, and SEO tools to help you build a solid, secure, and professional website.
Jetpack plugin also ensures that you get all the necessary features without installing multiple plugins and compromising the performance of your website.
Webhost Slow Server
Hosting is simply a place where all your website data – documents, images, files, etc. is stored. Hence it is required to have a good hosting plan for the optimum performance of your WordPress website.
One common mistake most new website owners tends to fall into is buying a cheap hosting plan without considering how it will affect the performance of their website.
Take for instance, In a shared hosting plan, you share the server with multiple websites which lead to slow loading speed and decreased performance on your website.
In addition, if not careful, some cheap hosting can be insecure and exposes your site to vulnerabilities and malware.
Solution
Choosing the right hosting plan is a great step towards boosting the performance of your website. Make sure you don’t compromise on security and performance by choosing a cheap and shared hosting plan.
Dedicated hosting with an independent server is preferable when choosing a hosting plan for your website.
Some other factors that you need to consider while sticking to a web host are the type of hard drive, RAM, and bandwidth of the web host.
Generally, web hosts have HDDs (Hard Disk Drives) or SSDs (Solid State Drives). For great performance and speed, it is advised to go with web hosts having SSDs.
Bandwidth, on the other hand, determines the data-transferring capacity of your web host. Make sure that, your website has all these factors at the optimum level.
When it comes to web hosting, there are various hosting providers available in the market such as Namecheap, Bluehost, HostGator, SiteGround, Hostinger, DreamHost, etc.
While not everyone has the budget to invest in an expensive hosting plan, it is important to note that cheap hosting and compromising the performance of your website isn’t a solution either.
To help you with that, Namecheap comes up with premium yet affordable hosting plans that boost the speed and performance of your website. Signing up with Namecheap will enrich your site with a secure hosting plan, 24*7 customer support, and a free SSL certificate for 1 year.
Hidden Malware
Malware is a program or a file that is designed to disrupt security and steal data from a system or a website. It can enter your system through various resources and corrupt and steal your site’s data. Malware is hard to detect as it disguises itself as other normal files.
Malware usually hampers the server resources which lowers the performance and loading speed of the website hence causing a slow WordPress website.
If you do not know how to protect your website from bots attack, malware can be the cause of a slow WordPress website.
Solution
Having understood how bad malware can turn out to be for the security and performance of your WordPress website, it is important that you eliminate malware from your website if you want to optimize the loading speed and security of your website.
To do so you can use the Sucuri security plugin that assists you to detect malware with the help of its malware scanner tool and also provides security to prevent future malware attacks.
You can also book a session with a Website expert to enable you quickly figure out where the bot attack is coming from.
Poor Quality Themes and Plugins
Themes and plugins are a great way to improve the overall look of your website and put an impression on your target audience’s mind. But are you aware, these appearance-enhancing factors can also lower the performance of your website?
Yes! of course, they can.
Poor-quality themes and plugins can make your website lose its speed. This could be mainly because such themes and plugins aren’t responsive enough, and hence they aren’t optimized to load properly on various devices.
Due to this, the loading speed of the website increases and cause results in a slow WordPress website.
These poor-quality themes and plugins purchased from third-party websites asides from a trusted website may have malware in their code which can badly affect the security and performance of your website.
Solution
To get the best out of the themes and plugins, make sure to purchase and install them from the official WordPress directory or trusted sites having the license and ownership of that particular theme or plugin.
Always choose well-optimized responsive WordPress themes for your website, so that your website will load effectively on any device without taking more time to load. Due to this, you will also be able to reach a wider user internet base as the majority of people surf the internet through their phones.
When it comes to purchasing themes and plugins, the official WordPress directory is a great and trusted platform to get the best fit for your website.
Unnecessary CSS
CSS simply means the way HTML elements are going to be loaded on the page of your website. To get the desired look, website owners tend to add excessive CSS on their websites which takes up a lot of space on their website. Due to this, unnecessary elements on a page can cause a slow WordPress website.
Solution
To avoid getting the issue of a slow website due to excessive website, make sure you limit the number of elements placed on your website as it will not put much load on the server.
In this way, a lot of space from the web server will not be occupied due to excessive CSS. Hence the loading speed and performance of your website will not be affected and web traffic will get a great user experience while surfing through your website.
To find unused CSS files, you can use the tool PurifyCSS to detect them and get to know how much CSS files need to be reduced. Once you get those files, you can remove them manually from your website.
Unoptimized Images
Graphics and images uploaded on the website look visually appealing and add an extra piece of content for the website visitors.
However, these images can also turn out to be a reason for the slow loading speed of your website.
Images having unspecified dimensions, large sizes, and non-responsive layouts can take a lot of time to load. This increases the server response time and website visitors must wait longer than usual to surf through your website.
Solution
When it comes to uploading images on your website, it is important to know the suitable size and dimensions that will not adhere to the loading speed. The optimal image size to upload on your website is 200Kb and 800 pixels.
These parameters will ensure the fast loading of the images without making the web traffic wait.
Manually resize and compress all the unoptimized and large images uploaded on your website to make them compatible with loading faster. Doing it manually can be a hassle if you have multiple unoptimized images uploaded to your website.
To help you with that, the Imagify WordPress plugin coming into the picture. The Imagify plugin assists you in resizing and compressing all the unoptimized images uploaded on your website without reducing the quality to make them load faster.
Enabling lazy loading for the images on your website is also a great option to deal with the slow loading speed caused due to images.
It simply means loading only those images which are currently shown on a user’s screen. In this way, the load on the server will be reduced and the loading speed of your website will increase.
To activate lazy loading on your website, you can use the WP Rocket plugin offered by WordPress or another Cache plugin. It assists you in effectively implementing the lazy load scripts on the images of your website.
Not Using CDN
You’re aware that the web traffic visiting your website is random and can come up from any part of the world. Loading time for such remote users increases, whose physical location is not close to your site’s server. To help you with that CDN comes into the picture.
CDN stands for content delivery network, it is a great way to deliver content rapidly to remote your users without making them wait for a long time. Not using a CDN on your website will make it hard to deliver the content rapidly and effectively if the user’s physical location is far away from the server.
Solution
To offer optimal speed and a great user experience to your web traffic make sure to use a CDN on your website. It will assist you to deliver content to any remote user without increasing the loading time.
When it comes to choosing a CDN on your website, there are various CDN providers available in the market such as Cloudflare CDN, Fastly, Gcore CDN, etc.
Cloudflare is one of the best CDN that enriches your website with ultra-fast and static content delivery, improved website speed performance, and reduced loading time for your website.
Conclusion
Fast loading speed for your website is essential if you don’t want your target audience to leave your website after getting annoyed by that buffering icon. The methods mentioned in this article are capable of fixing your slow WordPress website and yielding a fast loading speed and performance.
Speed optimization is a continuous process, you need to monitor the speed on a regular basis and avoid practices that can hinder the performance and loading time of your website.
Resources:
If you would like to learn how to supercharge your WordPress website speed and fix it in little to no time, you can get the ebook on a NEW Revealed Method for Fixing a Slow WordPress Website
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