Did you know that 40% of visitors leave a website that takes more than three seconds to load?
If your website is loading in four, five or even six seconds, you might be thinking, “what’s the big deal?”
Well, imagine your website as if it were Usain Bolt about to run in the Olympics final. Those few seconds are the difference between tasting gold and finishing at the back of the pack.
Believe it or not, your loading speed carries the same weight of importance when it comes to time on page, engagement and potential revenue for your brand. While this is true for all platforms, today we’re talking about WordPress, specifically.
Fortunately, if your WordPress site is slow, there are many ways you can fix it that don’t involve training for a gold medal race.
From a plug-in overload to unoptimized images and beyond, we’ll guide you through the top 10 reasons why your WordPress website may be lagging, plus share actionable solutions to fix the problem.
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How Know If Your WordPress Website Is Too Slow
If you suspect that your WordPress site is slow to load, there are a handful of different ways to check its performance.
1. Use A Speed Testing Tool
The easiest way to analyze your website’s loading speed is to use a speed testing tool. These tools, such as Pingdom and GTmetrix, can either be used as a free online test or a payment-based subscription.
Simply put your website’s URL into the search bar and the tool will dive into your site, pulling up an analysis and recommendations to improve your performance.
[Source: GTmetrix]
2. Try An Application Performance Monitoring (APM) Tool
Application Performance Monitoring is the process of combining a number of tools to analyze site-wide performance, reliability and user experience (UX).
Using an APM tool will help you understand whether your WordPress site is slow. It will also provide more rounded information, as it will perform a deeper inspection of the composition of your website.
While the exact process of analysis depends on the specific APM tool you use, you can expect to receive support in at least five key areas:
- Application Programming Interface monitoring
- Application architecture
- Service monitoring
- Container monitoring
- End-user experience monitoring
When combined, these features allow a company to not only track loading speeds, but also see a wide range of performance-related insights. This gives a wider coverage of potential operating issues, helping you to trace the root of a problem, such as coding errors or hosting to network issues.
If you’re looking to use APM to increase speeds and user experience on your WordPress site, you should spend some time researching the best providers for your unique requirements. However, Dynatrace, DataDog and Amazon CloudWatch are three industry leaders to use as a starting point.
3. Test Your Themes & Plugins
Running a test on your themes and plugins is a more specific way to figure out if your WordPress site is slow, and if so, whether your themes or plugins are causing the delay.
Run a series of checks using a speed testing tool with different sets of plugins and themes enabled, to help you to understand whether your site is slow, and what is causing it.
Once you pinpoint the problem, simply remove, clean or update the plugins or themes that are installed within your WordPress website, then re-test your loading speed as needed.
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9 Reasons Why You Might Have A Slow WordPress Site [+ Solutions]
WordPress is a highly customizable and powerful content management system (CMS). While this makes WordPress for business websites across industries a popular choice, even a powerful CMS can be slowed down by issues like oversized media or excessive plugins.
Although each case will look different from the next, there are a number of common causes to investigate as you dig into why your WordPress site is slow.
Here are |10 potential causes for your slow WordPress site|, as well as their solutions.
1. Unreliable Web Hosting
Websites need reliable, high-performance servers to store their data and load pages quickly.
Slow loading times, website downtimes and poor user experience are all direct results of an unreliable web hosting provider that does not operate with the bandwidth, CPU and RAM needed to deal with high traffic volumes and spikes.
Solution:
When it comes to choosing a web host provider, tried and trusted names reign supreme.
In fact, due to brand loyalty and consumer trust, GoDaddy operates with a 10% web hosting market share in the United States.
Here are three of the market-leading web hosting plan providers and their pricing plans:
- GoDaddy: WordPress hosting plans from $8.99 to $20.99 a month
- Bluehost: Shared hosting plans from $2.95 a month and eCommerce hosting at $9.95 monthly
- Google Cloud Platform: Basic WordPress hosting plans from $13.17 a month, increasing depending on specific website requirements
2. Too Many Plugins
WordPress is known for being a highly flexible and adaptable content management system, with the number of plugins it can utilize being a key feature.
While these plugins can add features and functionalities to a website, they also come with their own set of code that needs to be executed each time the page loads. This code can negatively affect a page’s loading speed, especially if multiple plugins are running at once.
What’s more, some poorly coded plugins can add unnecessary strain on a server’s resources and further increase page loading time. To ensure optimal performance, use only what is necessary and keep an eye out for plugins that may be slowing down your WordPress site.
Solution:
Be sure to scan the backend of your WordPress website, searching for old plugins that you haven’t deleted or active plugins that have little positive impact on your site.
In addition to keeping plugins updated to their latest versions, streamlining the number and quality of the plugins you use for your WordPress site will directly impact loading times and UX.
[Source: WordPress]
3. Failure To Use Caching
Caching is the process of storing a subset of data in a high-speed storage layer that is separate from the data’s original location. This allows future requests for this data to be received more efficiently, meaning shorter loading times and faster website speeds.
If you don’t utilize caching within a WordPress site, it can cause loading issues, as data and files are reloaded on every visit.
Solution:
By caching, it is possible to store these files, meaning they do not need to be reloaded for each page view, which can significantly improve loading times and performance.
Here are three of the best-known cache plugins for WordPress (and their pricing):
- WP Super Cache: Free
- W3 Total Cache: Free
- WP Rocket: Plans from $59 a year
[Source: GIPHY]
4. Unoptimized Images
Not optimizing the images that are placed onto your WordPress website can cause major page speed problems down the line.
These images take up more space than necessary when they’re unoptimized, increasing page loading times.
In turn, users will bounce from your site, negatively impacting your time-on-page analytics — all of which can harm your Google ranking.
Solution:
Some of the top tools (with prices) for image optimization include:
- Adobe Photoshop: Plans from $35.99 a month
- Compress Now: Free
- TinyPNG: Free, or $39 a year to go pro
But image optimization doesn’t just refer to heavy images and long loading times. For a seamless user experience, your website shouldn’t render images larger than the user’s screen, regardless of whether they are visiting from a desktop or mobile.
5. Failure To Use A Content Delivery Network (CDN)
A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is an important tool for optimizing WordPress website speed. Without it, all requests to view content on your website must be processed by your web server, which can cause page loading times to suffer as higher traffic comes in.
Solution:
Using a CDN, you can load pages across multiple servers. Here are some the most popular CDNs (with prices) that can help you boost your site speed:
- StackPath: Plans from $27.50 a month
- Sucuri: Plans from $199.99 a year
- Cloudflare: Plans from $0 to $200 a month
Speak with our experts. Set Up A Consultation
6. Excessive Ads Or Scripts
Both excessive advertising and advert placement can ruin credibility in terms of a website’s user interface (UI). Yet, more importantly, they are also a deciding factor in how Google views and ranks your WordPress site.
Not only can an ad overload violate Google’s spam policies, it can also cause an overcrowded landing page. This can negatively impact loading speeds and in turn, negatively impact user experience, which Google has claimed since 2018 is a core ranking factor it uses.
Solution:
The quick solution here is to limit the number of ads or scripts across your website.
Some pages may be able to store more ads and scripts without directly damaging the way the content appears on-screen. However, this does not make it possible to keep a high volume of ads, as they can still damage page speed, user experience and eventually Google rankings.
[Source: CNN]
7. An Improperly Configured Database
Your database stores all of the information needed to run your website, such as posts, pages, user accounts, comments and more. If not set up correctly or maintained regularly, your site can become sluggish and unresponsive.
Improperly configured databases can also lead to errors when loading content from the server, which will further reduce speed.
Solution:
If you want to make sure your WordPress site operates well, it is important to free up space and optimize your database by removing spam comments, outdated content and redundant features.
8. Conflicting Themes & Plugins
When plugins and themes are not properly optimized or updated, they can cause compatibility issues that will result in slower page loading times. This can be attributed to conflicting code and non-scalable theme coding.
Solution:
One way to avoid conflicting themes and plugins is to ignore the use of themes altogether, instead opting to develop a custom website design.
As a WordPress VIP Partner, we avoid the use of error-loaded themes, instead creating scalable and fully optimized custom websites tailored to your business goals and needs. Explore our end-to-end WordPress web design services.
9. Large Video Or Audio Files
Videos and audio files are generally much larger than text or images, which means they take longer to load on the page.
However, avoiding videos and audio files altogether can damage user experience and engagement. So, what is the solution?
Solution:
WordPress lazy load video plugins can be an incredibly useful tool at cutting loading times by limiting file sizes. Here are three of the |most popular free lazy load plugins| for WordPress:
When To Look For Professional Help If Your WordPress Site Is Slow
Your website is a direct representation of your brand. Slow, disjointed user experiences will lead to a drop in brand loyalty and trust.
In fact, 79% of online shoppers admit they’re less likely to return to a site with dissatisfactory speed.
Pair this with negative SEO and Google rankings, and your slow WordPress website will begin taking your brand on a downward digital spiral.
If you have tried a handful of quick fixes and are unable to improve the speed of your website, it might be time to seek professional help.
Fix Your Slow WordPress Site With Digital Silk
The ultimate fix for a slow WordPress site is a custom web design implemented by industry-leading professionals.
At Digital Silk, we help businesses across industries build high-performance websites that are tailored to meet their specific needs. From ideation to launch and beyond, our WordPress developers will cover every detail to ensure that your website is properly created for optimal speed and user experience.
We also offer comprehensive WordPress maintenance services which include regular backups, updates, security scans and more, to guarantee continued user satisfaction well after launch.
For more information on our custom web design services, as well as our branding, digital and content marketing and consulting solutions, schedule a consultation with our experts today and get a custom quote for your project!
Key Takeaways
We have discovered that there is not one root cause or easy fix for why your WordPress site is slow. While WordPress is a highly flexible, useful and powerful online CMS, it requires consistent auditing, maintenance and updates to keep things running smoothly for your website visitors.
To ensure a seamless user experience and lightning loading speeds, you should optimize your WordPress site at every possible touchpoint.
From compressed images and videos to plugin management and more complex coding solutions, our WordPress design and development experts are here to help. We’ll audit your website, define its loading speed and offer expert recommendations on how to speed up your site, and in turn, boost traffic and engagement.
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