How to Speed Up a Slow WordPress Website

Slow websites are expensive in terms of visitors. Users no longer have to wait for a page to load. The majority of visitors who take more than three seconds to visit your site leave before they’ve noticed your offerings. And it’s not just about visitors leaving. Google also takes pagespeed into account as a ranking factor.

A slow site can thus have a negative impact on your traffic on two fronts. One of the biggest reasons sales decline is often the blame placed on business owners when it comes to their content or design, however, sometimes it is simply load time. Fortunately, speed problems can be remedied. They are caused by a few common issues in most cases – bad hosting, bloated themes, unoptimized images, or too many plugins. These will take care of that, and your site will run faster in just a day.

In this post, we will discuss a few tips for identifying slow WordPress site loading issues and how to fix them effectively.

Why Your WordPress Website is Loading Slow

It’s a good idea to understand why your site is slow before you do anything about it. Common causes include:

• If you are experiencing traffic, shared hosting cannot process that.
• Large, uncompressed images
• Having too many plugins installed simultaneously.
• Running too many plugins at a time.
• A theme that is too complex and has too many features.
• No caching set up
• Failing to update WordPress core, theme, or plugin files.

At most sites, two or more of these problems occur. This is the reason why most speed fixes require a number of stages rather than one.

Choose a Hosting Plan Built for Speed

The maximum speed of your site is capped by the speed of your hosting plan. On an inexpensive “shared” host, you’ll share server space with hundreds of other websites. If the traffic goes up on any of those sites, your site goes down.

Managed WordPress hosting has been tailored for this. It’s optimized for WordPress files and setup and typically comes with some sort of caching and server-level speed enhancements. It’s priced more than basic shared hosting and for the majority of businesses, it is well worth the cost.

If you do not wish to change your host, at least find out what resources you have with your current host. Check CPU quotas, RAM, and shared or dedicated hosting. Sometimes it is merely a matter of upgrading your plan with the same host to address most of the issues.

Pick a Lightweight WordPress Theme

There are WordPress themes that have a lot of features that you might not need. There are sliders, animations and page builders integrated within the theme and custom widgets. All of this means that there’s additional code which will need to be loaded every time someone visits your site.

A light theme is faster to load as it contains less to process. Seek themes that are fast not necessarily ones that have the most visual options. If you choose a heavy theme, see if it has a ‘lite’ version; if not, consider using a simpler theme.

A flashy theme isn’t a requirement to have a nice-looking site. The clean, fast and simple is always better than the loaded.

Compress and Resize Your Images

Images are one of the primary reasons for WordPress sites to slow down. Unoptimized photos can be several megabytes large. Ten or twenty pictures per page, and you have a page that takes a long time to load!

While uploading any photo:

• Resize to the actual size it will be displayed in (don’t upload a 4000 picture wide for 800 picture space).
• Use a compression tool such as TinyPNG or ShortPixel to compress it.
• Avoid using PNG or JPEG; use modern formats when possible

You can use plugins such as Smush or Imagify to automate the compression of images that you’ve already uploaded. This can shave off a lot of the load time of image-heavy pages.

Reduce the Number of Plugins You Use

All plugins introduce code into your site. There are certain plugins that don’t actually impact performance too much. Some add additional scripts and stylesheets to each and every page, even pages you don’t need them on.

Take a look at your plugins and determine whether you are using every one of them. Turn off and remove any unnecessary items. If you keep them, see if there is a lighter alternative that can do the same thing with less overhead.

It is also important to consider the quality of the plugin and not only the number of plugins. Two or three badly coded plugins can slow down your site by over a factor of 15. Two or three badly coded plugins can slow down your site by more than a factor of 15.

Turn On Caching

Caching saves a copy of your page to avoid the need to re-construct it every time your users visit your site. If there is no caching, then WordPress will execute a database query and create the page from scratch every time and that will take longer.

Plugins such as WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache do this for you. The majority of managed WordPress hosts will also provide server level caching, so consult your hosting control panel before installing another caching plugin; otherwise there may be conflicts between two caching systems.

After you’ve enabled caching, people coming back and returning pages start getting faster.

Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

A CDN keeps a copy of your site’s content (images, stylesheets, JavaScript) on a server in different parts of the world. A visitor to your site loads those files from a server that is near him/her, rather than from a single central server that is distant.

If your audience hails from varying locations or countries then this is very important. Cloudflare provides a free CDN service which is easy to use and effective for most small to medium size WordPress sites.

Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML

Minifying is the process of removing unnecessary characters from your code (such as spaces, line breaks, comments) without altering the code’s functionality. It may seem innocuous, but on a page that has many CSS and JavaScript files on it, it can add up.

The majority of the caching plugins discussed above have a minification feature that you can turn on. There’s no reason not to do this unless it’s low risk and free performance.

Clean Up Your WordPress Database

There’s a lot of junk that accumulates in your WordPress database over time that’s not worth saving, like post revisions, spam comments, expired transients, and deactivated plugin data that hasn’t been deleted. A heavy database results in the slowness of each and every query that your site performs.

There are plugins available to do this, such as WP-Optimize or Advanced Database Cleaner, that can clean this up with a few clicks. This should be done periodically, particularly if you are a frequent blogger or have an online store.

Enable Lazy Loading for Images and Videos

The concept of lazy loading is that images and videos that appear below the fold will not load until the visitor scrolls down to them. The browser will only download what you’re seeing, not the whole page at once.

This is a feature that has been added to WordPress as a default feature since version 5.5, so you might already have it enabled. Otherwise most caching and image plugins have a switch.

Update WordPress, Themes, and Plugins Regularly

Not using the latest software is a security risk. The older versions of WordPress core, theme and plugin may execute less efficient code than newer versions. Indeed, developers make frequent releases that address performance issues, rather than security vulnerabilities.

Make a plan to review weekly or monthly for updates. Do back up before running major updates, as sometimes updates can interfere with other plugin or theme updates.

Test Your Site Speed and Track Results

What you don’t measure, you can’t fix! Try to use Google PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix or Pingdom to see how fast your current site is and what areas are slowing it down specifically.

Test your site before and after each change you make. This can help you determine which of the fixes were working for your site, as each individual site is unique.

When to Call in a Professional

If you’ve done these things and you still feel your site is slow or if you simply don’t have the time then you may want to consider hiring someone who has a passion for doing it. Your web design Fort Lauderdale team can audit your site and locate the precise jam points and repair them for you without the need for you to know all the technical aspects.

Increase in speed does not happen overnight. It is something that you sustain as your website expands and becomes more popular and increases in size. Once you have all the basics down (good hosting, a light theme, optimized images, and caching) you’ve addressed most of the issue. The remainder is maintenance.