There are over 74 million WordPress websites on the internet. The vast popularity of this open source website creation tool is due to how easy to use and inexpensive it is.
If you have a small business, utilizing the power of online marketing is a must. Having an appealing website with engaging content on can help you attract more customers with ease.
When people visit your website, you want to make sure it is fast and easy to use. If you are struggling with WordPress performance issues, now is the time to find and fix them.
The following are some of the things you can do when attempting to answer the question of why is my WordPress site slow?
1. WordPress Performance Issues Can Be Caused by Bad Hosting
While using a shared hosting provider for your new WordPress website may seem like a good idea, it can lead to big performance issues in the future. Most shared hosting providers offer things like “unlimited” bandwidth, emails and domains, but there is a catch.
In most cases, a shared hosting environment will be unable to provide you with the fast load speeds you desire especially during peak traffic hours. This lower level of performance can make it very difficult to keep visitors coming back to your website.
The best way to get the fast load speeds and reliability you need is by working with a cloud hosting provider.
2. Choose a Lightweight WordPress Theme
The WordPress market is filled with the options, which means you should have no problem finding one you love.
Choosing a theme that is filled with dynamic elements like sliders, widgets or flashy icons can make your website very appealing. However, the more dynamic elements you have on your website theme, the longer it will take for the pages to load.
If your main concern with your new WordPress website is speed, a lightweight theme is a great option. While these themes will not have the flash as more dynamic themes, it will allow you to increase your page load speeds.
3. Work on Reducing Your Image Sizes
Another major contributing factor to slow WordPress site speeds are images that are improperly sized.
Reducing the size of images without compromising their overall quality is a lot harder than you may imagine. Luckily, there are a variety of different plugins on the market that can help with this task.
Before choosing a plugin to use for this particular task, be sure to do your homework. With a bit of online research, you should have no problem figuring out which program can help you the most.
4. Make Use of Caching Plugins
Adding caching rules to your website elements can be nearly impossible without the help of a third party plugin.
If all of your pages are loading slowly, the first thing you should probably do is download a caching plugin. In most cases, these programs can significantly speed up a WordPress website in a matter of minutes.
Rather than letting slow page load speeds affect new visitors to your website, you need to make moves to fix these issues.
5. Content Delivery Networks Can Be Helpful
It is safe to assume that the people who visit your website are not very close to where it is being hosted.
In the past, this fact would cause slow load speeds for these visitors. With the invention of content delivery networks, business owners are able to give their visitors a consistent level of reliability and speed.
The content delivery network keeps a copy of your WordPress website in various datacenters all over the world. The main function of a content delivery network is to serve visitors with a copy of a webpage from the nearest possible location.
While a content delivery network may be a bit expensive, it is well worth the investment.
6. Consider GZIP Compression
For most people, compressing the files on their local computer is something they do to save disk space. This same principle can be applied to your WordPress website.
With the help of GZIP compression, you can dramatically reduce things like bandwidth usage. When a person tries to visit your website, their computer has to basically unzip the website.
This means the more files you have uploaded onto your website, the slower the page will load. If you are unsure about how to properly compress these files, consulting with a website developer is a great idea. They will be able to guide you through this filed compression phase with ease.
7. Cleanup Your WordPress Database
Most websites have a lot of unwanted and unused data on them. Going on your website to look for unused data like spam comments, old drafts of content and even unwanted plugins is a must.
The last thing you want is for your website to run slowly due to files you aren’t even using. By doing this, you can reduce the size of your website’s database and its web files, which will speed up your site considerably.
8. You May Want to Disable Pingbacks and Trackbacks
Pingbacks and trackbacks are basically alerts that you get when your blog or page gets a link from another site. While this may be useful, you can also track this information in things like Google Webmaster Tools.
By disabling pingbacks and trackbacks, you can reduce the strain put on your server resources. Not only can this speed up your website, it can reduce the chance of your website being hit by a DDoS attack.
Looking for More Information on WordPress Websites?
Without the proper care and maintenance, it is only a matter of time before you face WordPress performance issues. As soon as these issues are noticed, you need to take action to fix them quickly. If your unable to do this yourself or want a WordPress expert like me to take your site from slow to incredibly fast get it contact.
I would always recommend taking a backup of your WordPress site before making any changes Check out the other helpful blogs I have published on using WordPress.