A slow-loading WordPress website can leave visitors feeling frustrated.
According To Google, 53% of mobile website visitors will leave if a webpage doesn’t load within three seconds. If your site takes longer than this to load, your website could be turning away potential clients and customers.
In this post, we discuss how to check your page speed, and several reasons why your WordPress site might be running slowly.
How To Check Your Page Speed
Google ‘PageSpeed Insights’ and click the first link to run a speed test. Then, enter the URL of your website and click analyze. You will receive a report for both the desktop and mobile versions of your site. These scores serve as benchmarks to indicate areas where you may be able to improve.
Common Factors Of Slow WordPress Sites
If your WordPress website has lengthy page loading times, there could be several factors affecting page speed. Here are a few:
Too Many Plugins
One of the biggest culprits with site speed is your choice of plugins. Having too many plugins can slow down your WordPress site because each plugin adds extra code and can increase server load. Deactivating and removing unnecessary plugins can help streamline your site and boost its speed. If your WordPress site is slow, consider updating your plugins and removing unnecessary ones.
Large Images and Files
Large, unoptimized images can significantly increase load times. If you haven’t compressed your images, this could lead to a slow-loading website. Large CSS, JavaScript, and media files can also contribute to slower site speeds.
Code Issues and Conflicts
Code problems and conflicts can make your WordPress site slower by causing inefficiencies or errors in your theme or plugins. It’s important to check and fix any performance issues in your theme or plugin code to prevent your site from slowing down.
Additionally, conflicts between different plugins or between plugins and your theme can create performance problems. Regularly reviewing and updating your code, along with troubleshooting conflicts keep your site running efficiently.
No Caching
Caching stores static versions of your site’s pages and resources, which helps reduce server load and improve load times for users. Without caching, your WordPress site can experience significant performance issues as every request to your server requires processing from scratch. Without caching, your site may struggle to handle traffic efficiently, leading to slower performance and a poor user experience.
No CDN
A Content Delivery Network (CDN) can significantly improve your WordPress site’s speed by distributing your content across multiple servers worldwide. Without a CDN, users may experience slower load times, especially for global users. A CDN helps reduce latency by serving content from the server closest to the user. Implementing a CDN ensures faster load times and a better overall experience for a global audience.
Hosting Issues
The quality and type of hosting can affect performance and cause slow WordPress sites. Shared hosting, where multiple sites use the same server, can slow down your site, especially if other sites are busy. Additionally, a server far from your users can increase load times. Switching to a better hosting option or choosing a host with servers closer to your audience can greatly improve your site’s speed.
Optimize Your WordPress Website For Speed
Whether it’s the number of plugins, lack of caching, no CDN, or hosting issues, several factors can affect the speed of your WordPress website.
Don’t let a slow website impact your business. At Nine Isle Solutions, we design websites that won’t slow you down. Work with us to design a WordPress website designed with performance in mind.