What Makes Your WordPress Website Slower?
Speed up WordPress is a common demand nowadays because more than 65% of websites are built on WordPress. Your website speed test report may have a list of recommendations for improving site performance but some of them are hard to understand and solve for the beginners, however.
Learning what makes your website slower is the key to success for speeding up WordPress site and making smart long term decisions. Here we will show your some main reasons those makes your site slower.
- Web Hosting – When your web hosting server is not properly configured, it can make your site slower.
- Bad Theme and Plugins – If you’re using a poorly coded plugin, then it can significantly slow down your website besides it is also a great risk of hacking.
- WordPress Configurations – If your WordPress site is not serving from CDN and cached pages, it can overload your hosting server or crash entire site.
- Larger Page Size – Images that are not optimized can make your site pages larger and increase loading time.
- External Scripts – External scripts such as tracking code, analytics, ads or similar type of scripts can make your site very slower.
Now you know what slows your website. Though, these are the main reasons for slowing down your site. However, there could be some other reasons. As a beginner, you can fix these easily to gain speed score to 90% plus and load page in less than 3 sec. Follow the steps in this tutorial to know how to speed up your WordPress website faster.
Importance of Choosing a Good Hosting Provider
To get good speed, before start optimization, you have to choose the best WordPress hosting platform for your WordPress site. Good shared hosting provider like Interset or Siteground plays an important role in website performance.
On shared hosting server it shares resources like RAM, CPU, Disk Space with many other customers withing the same server. Its clearly seen that if your neighbour sites get a lot of traffic, then it may create performance issue for other sites in the entire server. Also shared hosting has many limitations like auto backup, site security, root access for advance optimization for google pagespeed.
On the other hand, by choosing managed WordPress hosting will give you the best-optimized server configuration to run WordPress sites. This pre-built configured managed hosting companies normally provide some features like auto backup and restoration, low latency DNS lookup, advanced server security to protect websites.
We recommend InterSet WordPress Hosting for the best WordPress configuration with a lot of features starting from 5$ per month. Also you can try Kinsta hosting for your WordPress site starting from 20$ per month for single WordPress site. They are well known for their server and easy user interface.
How To Speed up WordPress without coding
For the non-tech persons and beginners, it really hard to change website configuration. But dont worry.
InterSet helped thousands of site and users improve their site performance issue and in this tutorial, I will show how anyone can speedup WordPress site without any technical coding related knowledge.
If you have some time to point-a-click, we can start.
1. Install best Caching Plugin
WordPress pages are fully “dynamic”. This means they’re built on the go every time anyone visits a page or post on your website. To build your pages, WordPress has to run a process to find the required pieces of information, set it all together, and then send it to your user’s browser.
There are hundreds of WordPress caching plugin. But all of them all not good for your site. Among them, we recommend two of the plugins, one you can choose for your site for making faster without breaking anything. w3 Total cache made by BoldGrid Team is much complex then Wp super cache made by Automattic team – the WordPress.com company.
- w3 Total Cache – Search Engine (SEO) & Performance Optimization (WPO) via caching. Integrated caching: CDN, Page, Minify, Object, Fragment, Database support.
- WP Super Cache – A very fast caching engine for WordPress that produces static HTML files.
Also, you can use SG Optimizer made by SiteGround Team if you wish to run your site on Site Ground Hosting.
Use only one plugin on your site to avoid confliction because three have similar functionalities. If you need any expert support for advance optimization and setting up your plugins for the best configuration, get expert help
2. Optimize Images for Speed (Automatically)
Images bring life to your web content and help boost engagement. Researchers have found that using coloured visuals makes people 80% more likely to read your content. So, if your images aren’t optimized for the reader, then it could be hurting than helping to attract visitors.
Well, PNG image format is uncompressed file. When you compress an image it loses some information, so an uncompressed image will be higher quality with more detail. The negative side is that it’s a larger file size, so it takes longer time to load.
JPEG, on the other hand, is a compressed file format which slightly reduces image quality, but it’s significantly smaller in size.
So how can we decide which image format to choose on our site?
- If our photo or image has a lot of different colours, then we use JPEG.
- If it’s a simpler image or we need a transparent image, then we use PNG.
The majority of our images are JPEGs.
Below is a comparison chart of the file sizes and different compression tool that we could have used for the StrangeLoop image used above.
we recommend Smush image optimization plugin for WordPress site. It has many good features together like Optimize your images turn on lazy load, resize, compress and improve your Google Page Speed with the incredibly powerful and 100% free WordPress image smusher, brought to you by the superteam at WPMU DEV!
3. Keep Your WordPress Site Updated
WordPress.org releases update frequently to keep its platform secured and updated. Also they release new features for site owners. These updates are based on performance, optimization, site security and user interface and so on. So it has chances that if you don’t install new updates on your site can be compromised and could be a greater performance issues.
To install new updates just navigate to Dashboard > Updates or, go to the following link:
https://www.yoursite.com/wp-admin/update-core.php
4. Optimize JavaScript and CSS
5. Make fewer HTTP requests
6. Leverage browser caching
7. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
8. Audio / Video Optimization
9. Use a Theme Optimized For Speed
10. Optimize Database and Limit Post Revisions
11. Use Lazy Loading if Needed
12. Fix HTTPS/SSL Errors
13. Run WordPress on Latest PHP Version
14. Use Cookie less Domain
Conclusion
That’s the whole thing! We hope this article helped you learn best points with details how to improve wordpress speed and performance. You can new test speed of your website on Google Pagespeed or GTmatrix.
