How fast your website can load has a direct impact on your visitors whether they turn into new customers and fans. When your site can be delivered to visitors faster, you’ll drive everyone to get engaged in your content better. Moreover, page loading speed and server response time are significant factors that Google considers in ranking your website.

So, now the question is: what’s slowing down your WordPress site?

Or rather: What are the major factors affecting the performance of your WordPress site?

Let’s have a look at them more deeply one by one!

Slow Web Hosting

Arguably the most critical decision you’ll make for your website is to determine what web hosting company you’re going to trust to put all your content.

Obviously, the server in which your website lies possesses a significant impact on how fast your website loads. As a matter of fact, it could be the biggest bottleneck you have. Some of the lower priced hosting plans will merely NOT give you a fast website, regardless of what you do.

The majority of website owners choose to use a shared hosting since it’s a more affordable option. Shared hosting comprises several hosting accounts and any number of websites with a limited number of available resources (such as CPU usage and disk usage). The downside to this is that your “neighbors” might consume excessive resources that induce the server to be overwhelmed and perhaps even crash.

With hosting, you really do gain what you pay for. Since there’s very little you can do regarding your server speed, at that point, one thing you can do is get a better web hosting service. It’s so essential to choose wisely and to steer clear of companies that are known for server stuffing.

That’s why for shared hosting, I can’t recommend SiteGround enough. Not only are they reasonably affordable, but they have a shining reputation for well-managed shared hosting. On a personal note, I have tested one of my WordPress site hosted with SiteGround against Bluehost, a hosting company I formerly used – and there’s merely no competition. When hosted with SiteGround, the website loads several seconds faster per page.

Why You Should Choose SiteGround?

Keep in mind, according to numerous testing and research, poor hosting is the #1 factor to why a WordPress site is sluggish.

Using The Bad Plugins

Lots of people presume that having too many plugins is what slows down their WordPress site. However, that isn’t rather accurate considering that several plugins can consume massive resources.

It doesn’t really concern how many plugins you have on your website, but exactly how resource-heavy each of those plugins is. If one plugin is consuming all the server resources when it’s running, it undoubtedly could slow down your entire website. As on your phone when a single app is making use of 10% of your battery per hour, plugins can affect your website in an identical way.

Besides that, it’s likewise very important for you to employ only up to date and well-coded plugins. Two well-coded plugins are much better than one poorly-coded plugin.

Then how do you know if a plugin is good? If you aren’t well knowledgeable in coding, that’s alright! The best thing you can do on your own is to get to know how to research plugins – read up on what it’s they claim to accomplish, have a look at the approval rating from other users, and most notably, ask around for recommendations!

One thing you should always remember is that not all plugins are created equal.

Theme Not Optimized for Speed

If you’re picking a theme for your WordPress site, you always start with the theme design and that’s OK. You should initially choose a few themes that you like since you desire your website to be eye-catching and a great design is a preliminary thing a visitor sees. The second thing is most likely the features of the theme. Does the theme or the theme recommended plugins provide the functionality that you want? If it does, great! You are in business! What you almost always disregard is to check how quickly the theme can load. Themes that aren’t well-coded and unoptimized for speed can likewise contribute considerably to slowing down your WordPress site.

You can test the loading time of the theme demo page and you’ll swiftly see if the theme is optimized for speed. Of course, the loading time of the demo page can most likely be enhanced, so in case you fail to get a perfect score, don’t fret, no WordPress theme will obtain a 100% perfect score except if it has a little content on its demo page. As a rule of thumb, you should seek out themes that aren’t in the red figures (score 50 or lower on the page speed tools).

It boils down to a good equilibrium between theme design and features vs theme speed. As an example, a vacant WordPress theme with a little of a text will load very quickly, but a swollen theme with many features (most of which might not need), with tons of multimedia content, will load more slowly. When selecting a good and performing WordPress theme, hitting that sweet spot is the goal.

That’s why I recommend you to use a theme from StudioPress. All their themes come with mobile responsive and also have clean, lightweight code that makes your website fast, secure, and run smoothly.

Why You Should Choose StudioPress?

They’re trusted by over 210,000 WordPress users including Yoast, Matt Cutts from Google and Matt Mullenweg the founder of WordPress.

Too Many HTTP Requests

According to several benchmark services, in regards to website performance especially, HTTP requests take the major share of the whole page loading time. Statistically, more than 80%. The amount of HTTP requests relies on the number of elements your web page is housing.

Technically, every single element demands an HTTP request for getting downloaded on a browser. So, more page elements (image files, CSS, JavaScript, etc) lead up to a higher number of HTTP requests, and even more can significantly reduce the page loading speed.

However, you need to make sure you don’t limit the number of elements on your web page. Your website may seem to be extremely flat if you eliminate plenty of elements. So it’s important to keep it simple and never mess up your WordPress site with unneeded designs.

Remember to set a stringent guideline to optimize the number of elements you need on your web page. In addition, you can even streamline the number of scripts and place them on the bottom of the page or incorporate multiple stylesheets into a single one.

Another problem that induces your WordPress site to slow down is way too many external scripts – may produce hundreds of HTTP requests making your website unresponsive.

These sorts of scripts include external widgets, such as for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or something that is embedded. The most effective way to address this is with a few code snippets, but each website is different.

Images Are Not Optimized

Images bring life to your content and help raise engagement. Researchers have discovered that employing colored visuals helps make people 80% more potential to read your content. These days, images represent more than 60% of the content on the average web page.

But if your images aren’t optimized, they could be more painful than helpful. As a matter of fact, non-optimized images are among the most prevalent speed issues I see on beginner websites.

This is probably the most overlooked aspect of website performance and simultaneously, it can bring the most significant enhancement to your website speed. If you don’t ever think about optimizing the image before you upload it to your WordPress site, then this is a good step for your website loading time optimization.

Optimizing images implies processing them to ensure that they have a pretty good quality while still downloading quickly.

Your browser has to download all images displayed from your web server. The higher the image quality, the bigger the file size. Likewise, the bigger the image dimensions, the bigger the file size. And a larger image file takes longer to download.

Attaining a good balance between high image quality and low file size is more of an art than a science.

A very usual problem is that people upload images without any preparation. They don’t resize or process the image in any way to minimize its size. An image from your mobile phone can be several megabytes in size. This is much too big for the internet, even with today’s speeds.

Luckily, there are WordPress plugins (WP Smush, Kraken Optimizer, ShortPixel Optimizer) and free programs (TinyPNG, ImageOptim, IrfanView) which can be very helpful here.

An often neglected part of image optimization is sizing images for your particular website. Let’s say your website is designed to show images that aren’t larger than 800px by 600px. Anything larger than that needs to be resized by your website’s code to fit well toward the browser page.

Not Employing Caching

The other most critical factor is caching. It can remarkably boost your WordPress site loading speed, yet only if you can configure it appropriately.

Few subjects perplex the average non-technical website owner as much as caching. Here’s what it is.

Whenever your web browser (Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, etc) loads a web page, it requires to download that page content from your web server (the computer in which your website lives on).

That means downloading all the text, images, scripts and WordPress code on that page. Plus all the additional plugin code. This takes place every time the page loads!

Caching saves all of those downloaded files on your local hard drive. Next time a page on that website is loaded, your browser can employ local copies of the already downloaded files. Loading the assets from your local hard drive is considerably faster than rechecking online and downloading every time.

This simple technique can provide a substantial boost in WordPress site speed.

The confusion comes from not knowing how to accomplish this right. A good hosting company like SiteGround will provide caching for your website. Otherwise, merely use a well-known caching plugin for WordPress, there are lots of free and premium (paid) options. Usually, it suffices to employ one of the popular free caching plugins like W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache or WP Fastest Cache. While for the premium version I highly recommend WP Rocket.

Keep in mind that some objects ought to not be cached. These might include HTML files and scripts that need to be updated routinely.

These are 6 things you can address fairly easily today which would provide a significant boost in speed to your WordPress site. I know there are still many many more, but the above are the most common causes and the best place to start.

To drastically improve your website speed, read my speed optimization best practices.

Need any help? Don’t hesitate to send me a question in the comments below!

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