Why is WordPress Slow? Let's find out!
Knowing the causes behind why WordPress isn't working effectively isn't simple. It's difficult to pinpoint the reason behind a WordPress website is comprised of a variety of elements, that includes its website server as well as its associated settings to various plugins and themes. It could be due to unoptimized material, including video, images, or embeds.
How can you determine the root of this issue? It's difficult to pinpoint without a doubt what's the issue There are a variety of possibilities, and we'll look at the possibilities in this article.
Then we'll not simply look for the cause of why your WordPress site isn't working properly. We'll teach you a variety of methods to speed up your slow WordPress site.
Excited? Let's go!
Why is WordPress not as fast?
There are many factors that may affect your WordPress site's performance. Most frequently, the issues include:
- The company hosting your website is hosting your website
- Server-side optimizations (PHP version, caching, compression, etc.)
- Slow WordPress themes
- The WordPress plugins are extremely slow. WordPress plugins
- Unoptimized content (mainly images)
- Too many externe HTTP requests from outside HTTP
In addition to the server optimizations implemented by your host company, there are numerous things to make sure that your website is very fast. We'll discuss these in the next section, but first, let's figure out what's making your site slower.
4 Steps to Determine If Your WordPress site is running slow
Testing your website is an excellent option to determine what is slowing your site whether it's the web hosting provider, your website itself, or the combination of both? We'll look at some web tests you could conduct.
Step 1: Run Page Loading Speed Tests
How fast does your site load? If it takes more than two seconds to load is not ideal for the user experience. Ideally, you'll want to strive to reduce load times under one second. Anything in between is fine however , you should consider optimizing your site in order to make it better.
Start by opening GTmetrix and testing a website. Pick a server near your site (or your website's visitors) for better performance ( Tip: Create a free GTmetrix account to have additional servers).
We're currently testing the WordPress page's homepage because that's what most users will go to. The homepage also houses many pages of content which makes it ideal to test.
Once the test completes it will show the GTmetrix performance report that is as follows.
GTmetrix evaluates a website with a wide range of indicators. It also shows a visual timeline of how it loaded the webpage throughout the test. To fully comprehend it, you'll need scrolling down.
Tab Summary Summary tab outlines all of significant issues that can affect the speed of your site. The main issue is the speed of response from your server. It almost always implies looking into changing your hosting plans or migrating to a better hosting provider. Before you leap into this decision, it's better to fix each other problem and review the problem.
Another major problem is "Avoid the huge size that the DOM can take up" this is the most frequent problem when working with web page builders. The second issue is "Avoid massive changes to layout" could also be associated to theme builders and pages builders.
"Avoid massive network load" refers to the heavy load of assets, such as images, scripts and scripts along with CSS files. The webpage's Details section provides an overview of this. The overall size of the page as well as the number of requests to pages are pretty excessive.
By clicking upon the tab called Performance, the tab will give the user additional information that is reported by the browser, as well as Lighthouse Performance.
This testing webpage doesn't have much to offer. Go to the report's Structuresand Waterfalltabs could give more details.
The next step is Pingdom Tools, another popular software that tests speed. The same website will be tested on the homepage here.
Pingdom Tools website speed testing tool.
Pingdom Tools uses its own method to test the site. Its results aren't very appealing on this website either.
Scrolling down further will show you ways to boost the efficiency of your website. Each suggestion is able to be further developed to provide more details about how to make your website more effective.
As each speed testing tool utilizes its own particular performance indicators. You cannot compare one speed test's results with the results of another. Therefore, no matter what you choose, it's best to stick with that one you are comfortable with.
Second Step: Download and Check the website.
A load test will reveal fresh information about how quickly it runs in the real world. This is why we'll employ k6 to test this. K6 is a no-cost and open-source load testing tool that can be operate locally on your device.
K6 FOSS Speed test tool.
The free version from k6 requires some command line skills, but it's very powerful once you've mastered it. ( Note: Alternatively, you can utilize k6's cloud-based premium service or an easier cloud-based load testing instrument such as Loader.io)
In conjunction with its amazing report extension, you're able to run an load test and receive accurate results in HTML:
The above results are from the exact website which was loaded testing for 10 minutes with the highest amount of users. The report also includes other important information:
It is important to note that the majority of the requests did not succeed which could indicate that the server isn't able to handle the requests.
You can also create the rules and thresholds in k6 scripts (e.g. that the load time of the webpage is under 1.5s, users able to sign in or not, etc.). These statistics will also be visible on the Dashboard.
Below is a photo of the load test results on a different website that uses exactly the same conditions, to give a more clear picture.
There are 28 unsuccessful requests could appear to be not a problem, however it's not the case given the volume of requests. That's just 0.25 percent of the requests made by my personal computer. This data suggests that the hosting company can serve quite several concurrent users.
Step 3. Look at the themes and plugins available for Your WordPress Themes and Plugins
Test the performance of your WordPress plugins and themes should be your next method to identify any performance issues. There's plenty of options in this area and it's common to notice that certain themes or plugins perform better designed than other.
Prior to the speed-testing section, we covered identifying issues with themes or plugins within the test results. There's a different way to do it: turn off one of the plugins or themes in a single step and see what happens to the website (in an loading test and speed test as well as both).
If the issue with performance persists If the issue persists, turn off a different theme or plugin and then test the results. Keep doing this until you've found the root cause.
But, this approach should not be applied to sites with a production connection. Staging websites can help with this. It is a great method to test different variations of your site's layout by adding, altering, or even eliminating certain elements.
If your site is hosted by a company, you're in the right place, because each WordPress installation comes with an own staging environment. You just need to visit Your My Dashboard and choose your site, then change its settings from Live or the staging.
This site serves as exactly the same as the live version up to the server as well as server-side configurations. It allows you to utilize the site to modify and test your website without altering the live site.
Step 4: Use to use the Application Performance Monitor (APM) Tool
An APM tool, when combined with load testing and speed tools can boost your website's ability to identify.
Instead of creating the site to test it as well as guessing what plugin or theme you should switch off at any given time, an effective APM tool can assist you to identify the source of slow performance without changing everything on your site. It tracks and analyzes the performance of slow transactions and database queries. It also tracks other requests from outside, WordPress plugins, hooks and more.
The majority of the time using an APM tool won't be easy for novices. Even experts require education on using the tool effectively. Additionally, there's an extra cost since the majority tools require a license to operate.
I took the time to build a website that was not optimized to show this feature. Next, I enabled APM on this website via The dashboard, My. And then, I ran it through a couple of load tests to ensure that APM could gather information. The results are like this:
The Transactions tab lists those transactions that were the longest over the period that was monitored. This is a fantastic method to improve the performance of your website. It is due to the fact that wp-cron.php is the slowest. It could be activated by WordPress its own, the theme or plugin.
The next tab will be APM's WordPress tab. Here you'll find the slowest WordPress plugins and hooks.
If you notice any non-functional plugins here, or plugins which have redundant functions, you could remove these plugins from your WordPress website. As an example I have two contact form plugins listed on this page, along with a portfolio pluginthat WordPress can live without.
Scrolling down further down this tab will reveal the most slow WordPress hooks.
APM providing information on which are those that are Slowest WordPress hooks.
Monitoring the most slow WordPress hooks is one of the top features available by APM. You can click on the link for the hook to display its transaction.
Knowing exactly what plugin, theme or hook, is the biggest bottleneck to performance You can improve site performance as well as reduce time taken to take to.
17 ways to fix the loading time of a WordPress Website
You won't win the battle until you know how that will be won! Acting on that knowledge is the way to get your outcomes. You've performed all the tests which were discussed earlier. We'll now look into the areas you could increase the speed of your WordPress website.
You can jump into one of the sections by clicking on the links listed below:
1. Check to ensure that you keep your WordPress Website Up-to-Date
One of the most important aspects to maintain the integrity of your WordPress site is to keep it current. This might seem like something that's obvious, however, it's important to keep in mind.
WordPress updates include security patches, the most recent technologies, and improvements to performance.
It is also essential to keep every active theme and plugin is updated. If you discover a plugin or theme on your website that hasn't seen any updates in more than one year, you should reconsider its alternative.
2. Check that your website's images are properly optimized
Based on HTTP Archive (Mar 1 20, 2022) The mean page weight of the WordPress site is 2408 KB with images making up almost 1117 KB (46.38 percent of total the weight of the page).
It's no surprise that large images can slow down your website , which can result in a less-than perfect user experience. So, optimizing images, either by hand or through an application, will dramatically speed up page load times.
In order to improve the quality of photos It is feasible to go using lossy or lossless compression methods. Many image editors make high-quality adjustments when saving an image in order to get the best image compression. The lossy compression is usually the perfect sweet spot between maintaining image quality and reducing the size of a file's size.
WordPress has responsive images enabled as a default. It is possible to set the size you want for your images and allow WordPress handle everything else. If you'd like to decrease storage space, you are able to use a no-cost WordPress plugin like Imsanity for scaling large images down to the specified size regularly.
3. Use Plugins Cautiously (and only in situations where absolutely essential)
Plugins make up the basis of WordPress and its community. With a vast selection of plugins which includes 54,000+ plug-ins that are listed on WordPress.org and many other plugins that are available elsewhere there's a chance to be a mess when using WordPress plugins.
Unprofessionally created WordPress plugins may slow the performance of your website and increase the amount of duration it takes for loading the pages.
You can, however, use an array of WordPress plugins and not harm the speed of your site, but you must also ensure that they're properly coded and optimised to speed. More importantly, plugin developers should've developed their plugins in a way which allows them to work working together.
Whatever plugins you have installed, you can always refer to Step 3 and/or Step 4 within this blog post for the solution to the issue plugins.
4. Select the best Fast WordPress Theme
Selecting an user-friendly WordPress theme is crucial to the speed of your website and the general user experience. The theme's attributes, including layout, menus for navigation and the color palettes, fonts, as well as the arrangement of images are the first thing your customers will notice.
In the event that those elements aren't properly optimized, it could be beautiful website but it's also a slow one.
Before you choose a WordPress theme, write down all of the features you'd like for your site. It is then possible to look up themes and make notes that fit your requirements.
Make sure you choose reliable developers with high ratings and outstanding customer support. We also suggest avoiding themes that aren't updated often.
Do you want to know how we've increased the volume of our operations by over 1000 per cent?
Join over 20,000 others to get our weekly newsletter that includes insider WordPress tricks!
5. Configure Cache to Optimize Your Site
WordPress is based with PHP in conjunction with MySQL and both of them can become overwhelmed if you don't use caching. Therefore your website's speed is the result of a collaboration between the host and you and caching.
If cache is disabled this site works exceptionally well since it is optimized. However, with cache activated, it could increase the speed of its running by 33%. It's possible to add load times in the event that you're hosting thousands of visitors.
6. Reduce the amount of External HTTP requests (and API Calls)
The theme and plugins on your WordPress theme, as well the plugins may include external requests to different sources. These requests typically can be used to download externally hosted files such as scripts, styles, fonts, and stylesheets.
Sometimes, they're used to add features such as analytics, social media sharing, etc.
It is possible to use some of them, but excessive use of these will slow down your website. The speed of your website will increase site by reducing the number of HTTP requests. It will also improve the speed with that they're being loaded.
7. Make your website less cluttered with scripts Stylesheets, scripts, and Stylesheets
In the event that you shrink the dimensions of your web pages' code, you'll end up with a less JavaScript as well as CSS documents. In addition, they perform faster on loading, but they're also processed more quickly by the browsers. Together, they can enhance the speed of loading your pages.
8. Only use the scripts you need on Each Page Load
Minifying and combing the scripts may improve performance , however, it's better to avoid these scripts and styles from being loaded at all.
It is recommended to use the no-cost Asset Cleanup plug-in for this task. It will scan all the content loaded on the page. It'll then select CSS and JS files that aren't required on the specific page and minimize the amount of bloat.
Asset Cleanup works best in combination with caching because the optimized website page is not required to be updated every day by the server.
9. Accelerate Your WordPress's Slowness Admin Dashboard
The majority of times, the optimizations to the backend are based on improving the frontend. This is because speeding up the frontend generally fixes performance issues also at the backend.
If you're having issues with performance in your WordPress administrator, you can apply the same process as reversed. Fixing issues in your backend's performance could assist in speeding up the performance of your website's customers.
10. The Server's Location, Configuration and the Place are important.
The place you host your website server as well as its configuration could dramatically affect the speed of your website.
For instance, if your server for website hosting is in the United States, your website will likely load slowly for visitors from Europe or India in comparison to visitors who are from the United States.
You can mitigate this by making use of:
- A server that is close to your site and has the largest of your site's visitors.
If you have a site which is well-known to an international audience, you could further enhance its performance through the Cloud Delivery Network (CDN). Cloudflare is the main engine of the CDN and we'll go over this in the following section.
Do the server's resources automatically expand during unexpected traffic spikes or do you have to change your plan every time?
This is a list of questions you can ask a trustworthy web hosting service can provide to you with lots of energy. It is crucial to regularly look at these companies.
By combining these devices with most recent software, such as Nginx web server, 8.1 LXD containers and MariaDB The websites you host will load in the flash of an eye.
11. Use the Content Delivery Network (CDN)
One of the most efficient ways to speed your website is to utilize the fastest and the most secure CDN.
CDNs CDN helps reduce the workload of your website server by the immediate delivery of your content to visitors. They are networks of servers (also called POPs) which are built to store and distribute different versions of your content, such as images, stylesheets, fonts, scripts, along with videos.
We suggest that every site to use at minimum one type of CDN to speed up their performance.
Guidelines:If your website uses one of the most well-known open source JavaScript libraries (e.g. JQuery D3.js, three.js, Web Font Loader) If you do, then you have the option of making usage of Google Hosted Libraries CDN to accelerate their delivery.
12. Remove unnecessary URL redirects
Most often, the issue caused by unconfigured URL redirects may result in a sequence of redirects. In some cases, this chain may be an endless loop of redirects. Redirect chains are typically responsible for an increase in loading time.
This is how to avoid the need for unnecessary redirects
- Utilize the proper URL suffix (HTTP or HTTPS).
- Make sure to remove or preserve any "www" subdomain in the URL (don't combine them).
- Make sure to include the complete URL path.
Visit the website you wish to control by clicking on the "Redirects" section. You can then add a redirect by pressing the large "Add the redirect rule" button.
13. Fix WordPress Mixed Content Warns (HTTPS/SSL Errors)
The mixed content alert is visible on websites that have HTTP as well as HTTPS content. Unsecurely loading resources isn't only a security concern, but is also a possible performance issue.
If you get an inconsistent website content It is possible to use an online tool such as How Do I Remove a Padlock to show the content that is loaded unsecurely.
14. Improve Your WordPress Database Regularly
For instance as an example, for instance, The WordPress database may still hold data from the past when you first launched your site. It includes posts and pages revisions, drafts and trashed comments as well as deleted posts. Although they can be useful for making edits and publishing the latest posts, with time, the database is likely to accumulate a lot of ineffective data and will eventually get overloaded.
Therefore it is essential to optimize the performance of your WordPress database is vital in order to keep and enhance your site's performance.
15. Choose a cloud-based WordPress Security Service
There are a lot of WordPress websites are hacked each day. This is why security is a major concern when it comes to WordPress sites, and you must be in the know at all times.
There are two ways to safeguard your WordPress site with a firewall:
- Make use of an external security service to secure your site
The first option is clear-cut. An experienced WordPress hosting provider will take care of most of your security needs for you.
But, if you need opt for the second option the two choices are:
- Opt to install the WordPress security plugin (e.g. Wordfence)
- Select a DNS Firewall (e.g. Cloudflare)
Additionally, we provide Two-factor authentication (2FA) in addition to IP Geolocation blocking. Additionally, we are able to block IPs with six failed login attempts in a period that is less than one 30 seconds. We also require secure connectivity (SFTP, SSH, HTTPS), require strong passwords to all new WordPress installations, and offer an assurance of hack-fix.
16. Update to the most recent PHP Version
This article was written at the time of writing this in this moment, PHP 8.1 isn't fully accepted by the vast majority of WordPress themes or plugins, and also as tools for development. If you're planning to upgrade an existing configuration of your site to PHP 8.1 We recommend to test the upgrade thoroughly in a staging environment to be sure the upgrade won't go wrong.
However, if your server is still on PHP 7.x version you're on the server can be upgraded to PHP 8.0 to reap maximum benefits.
17. Switch to a reliable Managed WordPress Host
Most often managed WordPress hosting offers a wide range of features to help WordPress sites run efficiently easily, safely, and swiftly. Technical expertise is managed by experts , so you can concentrate on the management of your business.
Summary
Tell us your thoughts in the comments of if could fix your slow WordPress website. Make sure to take an interest in our list of areas that you can boost the speed of your website.
Make it easier to save time, money, and maximize site performance with:
- Support and assistance 24/7 help by WordPress experts in WordPress hosting, 24 hours a day.
- Cloudflare Enterprise integration.
- Global audience reach with 29 data centers around the globe.
- Optimization with our integrated Application for monitoring performance.
Article was first seen on here