Why is my WordPress site so slow? Let’s deal with the problem

Ideally, your site should load in less than two seconds for most users. Research has shown that nearly half of consumers expect web pages to load within two seconds. Even a one-second delay can result in a 7% decrease conversion rates. According to marketers’ calculations, 47% of online store customers expect page load times of less than two seconds, and 40% of users will leave the site after three seconds of waiting.

I’ll tell you how to prevent your WordPress site from running slowly. And you will no longer have to ask yourself the question: “Why is my WordPress site so slow?”

So, to understand why your WordPress site is loading poorly, we will look at the main reasons. Read them carefully: you will find a solution to your specific problem. If you try all the options but nothing helps – write in the comments, and we will help you find a way out of the situation.

Plugins are certainly very useful for WordPress and help it work. However, their excess will only harm the site. It is logical that the more you use the site, the more plugins you install on it.

Outdated plugins make the site heavier and negatively affect its loading time. The more plugins are loaded on the site, the harder it is for it to load the page. If you do not want to wait for your site to load for a hundred years, then without pity delete those plugins that are already outdated or that you no longer use. Or you can disable them so that they don’t just sit there and do nothing. Website performance is also affected by plugins that have been installed but remain inactive.

You can install a lightweight plugin called Query Monitor, which helps identify plugins with poor performance and find alternatives. But it’s also important to remove this plugin after you’ve finished using it.

Understandably, you want only high-quality, cool images on your WordPress site. However, this means that they become “heavy” files on your site. Your images cause slower loading times, which can cause your WordPress site to freeze.

How good it is that you can compress your images, and this will help speed up your site. Compressed images have two huge advantages: they are lightweight and they do not lose quality. If you do it right, then your site’s page load time will be reduced by a full second, which will allow it to work much better and faster.

I suggest using a cool plugin for WordPress called TinyPNG. With it, you can compress PNG and JPEG images. The TinyPNG plugin allows you to optimize about 100 images per month.

A fast and constantly accessible website starts with a thoughtful approach to choosing its hosting platform. You should start with selecting technical parameters suitable for a WP site. It is important to remember that, in essence, WordPress is a single-threaded PHP application, the speed of which will be greatly affected by the CPU frequency. The higher the CPU processor on the hosting, the faster the CMS will be able to generate an HTML document, and the user will receive the requested data from the site.

It is equally important to choose the right type of hosting. At first glance, it may seem like a good idea to upload a new site to an economy tariff of virtual hosting, which promises full placement on the Internet at minimal cost. But the site will share the site with an unspecified number of “neighbors” capable of “pulling” shared resources onto themselves. It is wiser to choose more advanced hosting options – VDS, dedicated server, or cloud hosting, which are a little more expensive but offer reliable resource sharing and better security.

Is your WordPress site performing poorly? Optimizing or removing unnecessary data from the database will reduce its size to a minimum and will also help reduce the size of backups. Among other things, it is necessary to remove spam comments, fake users, old content drafts, and unnecessary topics. Such a reduction in the size of databases and web files will speed up the work of WordPress and the site on this CMS.

1. An important step in optimizing databases is deactivating or removing unnecessary plugins.
2. To find them, you can use special plugins, such as Advanced Database Cleaner. If the plugins used are even useful but overload the system excessively, you can look for their functional alternative in the form of third-party services (for example, IFTTT, Zapier) for automation or scheduling tasks.

When all unnecessary plugins are removed, you need to set up caching so that information about pages and files is saved in visitors’ browsers and loaded when they access the site again, rather than being requested from your server. This will save you several network resources and allow the site to work much faster.

However, do not forget that pages loaded from the cache may not display the updates made to you. If your site broadcasts social media feeds or, for example, constantly changes product prices, you should test how caching affects dynamic elements. The advantage of WordPress over many other CMS is that you do not need to set up caching manually – there are several non-commercial plugins for this, such as Total Cache and Super Cache, thanks to which caching is launched in a few clicks.

A heavy theme can also create a significant load. Many WP templates, both free and paid, for example, purchased or downloaded for free from the popular marketplace Templatemonster, look very stylish, but are often very overloaded with unnecessary functionality, most of which is not needed by an ordinary web resource:

• Many plugins and options are not used, but at the same time create unnecessary tables in the database and clutter it;
• Unnecessary images, usually located in the uploads folder;
• Load on the admin panel due to the creation of different types of data displayed as separate menus, etc.