Fast loading websites improve user experience, increase your page views, and help with your WordPress SEO. How to speed up WordPress is one of the most important topics nowadays. Luckily, there are various ways to speed it up!

It’s important to take your WordPress performance seriously. If you’re facing this kind of issue with your site, we’ll tell you the common reasons for why your website is taking time to load, and ways to fix them.

Why is it so important to have a fast-loading site?

  • With a slow-loading site, your customers will be disappointed and leave the website when it takes more than 4 seconds to load.
  • The faster your site is, the longer a user will stay on it. This will reduce your bounce rate and increase conversions on your site. Every user retained on your website is a chance for potential conversion.
  • When listing search results, your WordPress Site Speed is one of the ranking factors that Google takes into account when listing search results.
  • This is because Google wants its users to have the best user experience possible, and the speed of a website is a huge part of that.
  • The first look at your business that visitors get is your WordPress website. If they visit a website that is slow to load, it’s like going to a shop and find out it’s closed.
  • The patience of customers surfing the internet is very low.
  • Woocommerce websites can lose sales within a matter of seconds if their website isn’t fast. Just a 2-second delay could mean up to 87% of cart abandonment.

Why Your WordPress Site is Being Slow:

There can be diverse reasons why the WordPress site is taking too long to load, and below you’ll see a list of the most common issues that you may encounter. As many reasons there can be, the impact is always on user experience.

1. Issues with the Web Host.

You can be having issues with the WordPress slow server response time. The web host is fundamental to how your website performs.

For instance, if you sign up for a shared hosting plan, you will share server resources with other websites. If you expect less than 100 visitors per day, this may not be a problem. However, if you’re hoping for more visitors, it will affect the performance of your WordPress.
When it comes to hosting services, there are numerous options, including managed hosting, VPS hosting, shared hosting, etc. You should carefully understand the features of each type before choosing one.

 

2. Unoptimized Images.

When the website is overloaded with content, it will likely fall apart. This is what happens in the case of using lots of images and other media, although they’re highly important for engaging visitors, if you use a lot of them, your WordPress site will load slowly.

The same goes for overloading the site with content. Text content does not take up too much space, but videos do. A smart alternative is to embed a Youtube link on your website instead.

 

3. Theme with Poor Quality

Picking the right theme for your website is essential, as it affects more than just how your website looks.

Poor quality themes or nulled themes may mean the theme is bloated and will not be a high-performance theme. Moreover, nulled themes have backdoors and vulnerabilities that can be exploited by hackers.
If you want to speed up your WordPress, do some research before selecting the theme and make sure you update it regularly.

 

 

4. Too Many Plugins.

The plugins also affect your WordPress performance, just like the theme does. Of course, the more plugins you have, the more space they take up, but the important issue is that if the plugins you use are not built for performance, your WordPress site will suffer.

 

 

 

5. WordPress is not Updated.

In order for your website to run smoothly, updates are highly important, including updating WordPress regularly.

This will offer protection from any threats that may have been presented in previous versions, and updates often fix bugs that slow down websites.

 

 

6. Hidden Malware.

There are many times in which website owners don’t realize that malware is hidden within their site.

Malware can weigh down the website and slow its performance by using up server resources and make it vulnerable to hacks and attacks.

 

 

 

7. Too Many HTTP Requests.

HTTP requests are a protocol through which any action on a web server is taken.
A client or a user makes a request to a server, and if the request is accepted, an action is triggered on the server. If your website server is occupied with too many HTTP requests, it can adversely affect your WordPress performance.

 

 

 

8. Not Leveraging Cache.

The cache saves files from the server onto your RAM or disk, so that the next time you load the webpage, it is much faster.
If you want to speed up WordPress, you want to leverage cache, and use it to boost your website performance.

 

 

 

 

9. CSS Not Optimized.

CSS, better known as Cascading Style Sheets, is a language used to control the presentation of a website, in other words, is responsible for the look and feel of the website.
Unoptimized CSS can cause sites to load objects in the incorrect order, with pages displaying improperly, or worse, showing up blank.

 

 

 

10. Unnecessary Redirects.

Too many redirects can affect your WordPress site’s load time.
That’s why it is important to optimize your WordPress redirects so that your website keeps running smoothly. Clean up redirects through old or broken URLs in order to optimize your website performance.

 

 

11. Not Using a CDN.

A Content Delivery Network is a network of servers that distribute content from your website servers across the world so that the load time of your website is reduced.
Not using a CDN may affect your WordPress site performance in certain geographical areas.

 

 

 

 

12. Too Many Ads or Pop-ups.

When you host ads on your website, there are more external servers involved, and if these ads are not optimized or are hosted on slow servers, it can bring down your website load speed considerably.

 

 

 

How to Speed Up WordPress Site:

 

 

1. Secure Your Site From Malware.

To confirm that your site has been infected, you should scan your website with a security plugin.

 

 

 

2. Choose a Good Web Hosting Service.

Make sure that you have an efficient and compatible web host and a managed hosting solution.

 

 

 

 

3. Optimize Images.

Reduce the size of the images you use on your website.
This will improve the performance of your site and speed up WordPress.

 

 

 

 

4. Use HTTPc2 over HTTPv1.

Securing your website with an SSL certificate will shift your website to HTTPS which is a secure extension of HTTP.

This will not only add to your website security but will also optimize your WordPress so that browsers can support HTTP/2 for your website more easily if your web host is compatible. As HTTP/2 is better equipped to handle multiple requests, this will enhance your WordPress performance.

 

 

 

5. Cache your Website.

Cache your website with a caching plugin. This will save a lighter version of your website on your server.

 

 

 

6. Optimize CSS on Your Website.

Optimizing CSS can speed up WordPress vastly.
You can load your CSS inline by placing it in the site’s HTML code itself. Or you can load it asynchronously by identifying the most critical aspects of the site and making them load first.

 

 

 

7. Choose the Right Plugins.

Don’t weigh down your website!
Install only the necessary plugins to speed up WordPress. Remember to update your plugins regularly so that they run smoothly.

 

 

 

 

8. Update Your Site Regularly.

Update WordPress, themes, plugins, and all parts of your sites regularly.
This will help your site maintaining a fast loading time.

 

 

 

 

 

9. Use a Content Delivery Network.

A CDN will leverage the network of servers across the world to make sure that visitors can access your website content fast.

 

 

 

 

10. Use a Lightweight Theme.

If you want your WordPress site to load fast, make sure that you are using a lightweight theme on your website and that there aren’t any additional bulky themes on your WordPress that take up server space.

 

 

 

 

11. Leverage Lazy Loading.

Lazy Loading is a loading technique that uses the concept of inertia to optimize your WordPress for speed.
With lazy loading, your web pages are created with a placeholder for images and other files. This makes the page a lot lighter than it would be otherwise. When the user needs the resource, the placeholder is replaced with actual content. This technique is known to optimize web apps and websites for a faster loading time.

 

 

 

12. Enable Gzip Compression.

Compressing the site for a faster load speed is a great way to deal with a lot of content.
Gzip compression is a method through which you can compress your site’s HTML pages, stylesheets, and scripts as the data is being sent to another server.

 

 

 

The Negative Impact of a Slow Loading WordPress Site

  • The first look at your business that visitors get is your WordPress website. If they visit a website that is slow to load, it’s like going to a shop and find out it’s closed.
  • The patience of customers surfing the internet is very low.
  • Woocommerce websites can lose sales within a matter of seconds if their website isn’t fast. Just a 2-second delay could mean up to 87% of cart abandonment.

The Importance of a Fast-Loading Site.

  • Besides disappointing your customers, there are more issues that can be presented when having a slow site:
  • When listing search results, your WordPress Site Speed is one of the ranking factors that Google takes into account when listing search results. This is because Google wants its users to have the best user experience possible, and the speed of a website is a huge part of that.
  • The faster your site is, the longer a user will stay on it. This will reduce your bounce rate and increase conversions on your site. Every user retained on your website is a chance for potential conversion.

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