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A slow website is a nightmare for everyone – website owners, visitors and not least Google. Slow WordPress means more wasted time waiting for pages to load, not to mention the growing impatience and frustration that causes users to leave the site and not return.
If your WordPress site loads slowly, it can really hurt the visitor experience. It can have an even more negative impact on online stores. It’s crucial to put a lot of focus on WordPress speed to make sure it loads quickly and smoothly.
There are many reasons why a WordPress website is slow and in this article we will talk about the five most common reasons.
See also How to speed up WordPress – two important things
1. The website is not cached
When a user visits a website, their browser sends a request to the server to get the site’s files loaded so the visitor can view them. These files include pictures, scripts, design elements and any other files. If you have a lot of files on your website, it will take a while to load, especially if the content is also dynamic.
In general, dynamic content loads much more than static content. When caching, a static version of the website is stored, allowing visitors to download this file to load faster. In other words, if the website is not cached, the server will slow down its attempts to respond to multiple requests simultaneously, which in turn also increases load times.
There are great free and paid caching plugins to get instant results and a huge improvement in loading speed.
- NitroPack – gaining popularity, created entirely by Bulgarian team.
- LiteSpeed Cache – if your website is hosted on a LiteSpeed Web Server, this plugin is the #1 choice.
- WP Rocket
- W3 Total Cache
- WP Super Cache
Some hosting providers offer caching solutions that are optimized for their servers, such as SuperCache Manager by SuperHosting. You can contact your hosting provider to find out more.
2. Old version of PHP
Updates are often done for many reasons – improved security, increased performance, additional features, etc. Even if all the components of your website are up to date, it will still load slowly if the foundation of it all – PHP – is out of date.
PHP is the main language of WordPress websites, which means that an outdated version of it will seriously hinder the performance of the site as a whole. Currently, WordPress requires at least PHP version 7.4.
The hosting provider should be using the latest version of PHP, but older hosted sites may have an old version left. You can contact your hosting company and ask for a check and if necessary they will upgrade the PHP version.
It’s important to check that all plugins and themes are compatible with the higher PHP version before upgrading and update them if necessary.
At Pixadoro, we see this a lot when helping clients who are using a very old version of PHP on their web hosting server. You should always use the latest version of PHP that is available. Here we are invariably talking about improved PHP execution speed, but there are also serious security improvements that come with the new version of PHP.
3. Too many plugins
While plugins are useful in terms of adding features to a website, too many plugins will eat up server resources.
An excessive amount of plugins installed and activated in WordPress can be detrimental to speed. It must be remembered that each plugin once installed and activated adds its own requests to the server. Each of these requests takes time to execute. The more requests that run, the slower it will take for the website to render. Evaluate all plugins and leave only the ones that are really needed. You may also consider looking for alternative plugins to the current ones that are better written, optimized and don’t affect the site speed as much. In some cases speed comes with a sacrifice. Don’t overload your website with too many active plugins that aren’t needed at 1000%.
One more thing – many of the plugins add their own javascript and css files needed for the plugin to function. Loading these files in itself puts a strain on loading and it’s a good idea to consider optimizing the loading of all scripts, file minification and caching. One great plugin is Autoptimize for example.
4. Cheap hosting
Although trying to find the lowest cost solutions is a goal for many businesses, it is not a good strategy when it comes to choosing a hosting provider for your website. From downtime to security, a hosting partner is what ensures your website keeps going. If you’ve chosen a cheap plan, it may be because you’re just starting out and don’t need additional resources or features to get the site up and running.
However, the website will grow over time and if you stick with the cheap hosting plan, the site may start to suffer. Server resources such as CPU time, ram and storage space will run out quickly, slowing response times and increasing loading speeds.
Cheap plans are extremely popular and as a result, a single shared server often hosts hundreds, even thousands of websites, which inevitably affects performance.
We fully understand that many business owners and other WordPress users have a limited budget when it comes to developing and hosting their website. But the hosting decision is the foundation of your website’s success. Invest in a good web hosting company.
At Pixadoro we partner with Superhosting.bg. We have a special promo code for SuperHosting.bg PIXADORO for -10% discount for:
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5. Unoptimised images
Images are an important part of any website and especially for online stores. We have seen many websites that have images with huge sizes of 1,2,3 even 4-5 MB per image. Every kilobyte makes a difference when loading the page. This is especially true when the site is visited from mobile devices that use slower internet connection. Important for images on the site are:
- The image should be optimized for resolution – no need for a 1920×1080 image if the site renders it at 500px wide for example. A smaller resolution also means a smaller file size that will be downloaded by the browser.
- The image should be optimized in terms of file size – any unnecessary meta information can be removed, compress the image so that no quality is lost and combined with the optimized resolution it can be reduced from a 2MB size to 120kb which is perfectly okay to put on the site.
Before uploading a photo to WordPress, we recommend compressing it via https://tinypng.com/ – a great free service that optimizes and compresses PNG and JPG images without loss of quality by reducing the size by up to 70%!
See also: image optimization – fast loading WordPress
6. Bonus
- Theme problem – it is possible that the theme you are using is outdated and not optimized – always use the latest version of the theme. If the theme itself is not well written and uses too many scripts and styles, you should consider using another theme.
- You use a lot of third-party scripts – it could be Facebook, Google, Hotjar, CrazyEgg, digital marketing services, etc – almost all of them specify their scripts to be placed in the header of the site, which inevitably affects the loading speed. Review all these extra scripts carefully, remove the ones you don’t use, and move the rest to the site’s footer. Keep in mind that some services need to be in the header to report correctly. If you don’t know which scripts should stay in the header, you can contact us for advice.
- The site is infected with malicious code – this is not only a threat to the security of the site/business, but also to its users. Google and all search engines often punish such sites by demoting them in search results or even, in extreme cases, blacklisting the domain and removing it from the results entirely. It’s important to keep all themes, plugins and WordPress itself up to date – updates often fix security flaws. If you have any doubts that your site is infected you can contact your hosting provider, who can scan the site and clean it of malicious code if necessary.
Final words
There are many reasons why a website is slow. You can start checking for the factors we talked about above to find out what’s making the site take forever to load, then do whatever it takes to optimize. If you’re having trouble speeding up your website you can contact us to do a preliminary audit using performance metrics from GTmetrix, Pingdom and Google PageSpeed Insights and decide how best to optimize your loading speed.
Learn more about our WordPress and WooCommerce Speed Optimization service.
