5 Common Reasons Why WordPress is Slow

A slow website is a nightmare for everyone — both website owners and visitors, not least Google. Slow WordPress means more time wasted waiting for pages to load, not to mention the growing impatience and frustration that causes users to leave the site and not return.

If your WordPress site loads slowly, it can really hurt the visitor experience. It can have an even more negative effect on online stores. It is extremely important to put a lot of focus on the speed of WordPress to make sure it loads quickly and seamlessly.

There are many reasons for a WordPress site to be slow and in this article we will talk about the five most common reasons for this.

1. The website is not cached

When a user visits a website, his browser sends a request to the server to receive the site’s files to load and the visitor can see them. These files include photos, scripts, design elements, and any other files. If you have a lot of files on your website, it will take some time to load, especially if its content is also dynamic.

In general, dynamic content loads much more than static content. Caching stores a static version of the website, which allows visitors to download this file to load faster. In other words, if the website is not cached, the server will slow down its attempts to respond to multiple requests at once, which in turn also increases the loading time.

There are great free and paid caching plugins to get instant results and a huge boot speed improvement.

• NitroPack — gaining popularity, created entirely by a Bulgarian team.
• LiteSpeed ​​Cache — If your website is hosted on LiteSpeed ​​Web Server, this plugin is the number one choice.
• WP Rocket
• W3 Total Cache
• WP Super Cache

Some hosting providers offer their caching solutions that are optimized for their servers such as SuperCache Manager by SuperHosting . You can contact your hosting provider and ask more.

2. Old version of PHP

Updates are often performed for many reasons — improved security, increased performance, additional features, etc. Even if all the components of your website are up to date, it will still load slowly if the basis of it all — PHP — is outdated.

PHP is the main language of WordPress websites, which means that its outdated version will seriously hinder the work of the site as a whole. Currently, WordPress requires at least a version of PHP 7.4 .

The hosting provider should use the latest version of PHP, but older hosting sites may have an older version. You can contact your hosting company and request a check and, if necessary, download the PHP version.

It is important before checking for a higher version of PHP to check if all plugins and themes are compatible with it and to update if necessary.

At Pixadoro, we see this often when we help clients who use a very old version of PHP on their web hosting server. You should always use the latest version of PHP that is available. We are always talking about improved PHP execution speed, but there are also serious security improvements that come with the new version of PHP.

3. Too many plugins

While plugins are useful in terms of adding features to a website, too many plugins will eat up server resources.

Excessive plugins installed and activated in WordPress can be detrimental to speed. It should be remembered that each plugin after it is installed and activated adds its own requests to the server. Each of these requests takes time to execute. The more queries are executed, the slower it will take the website to visualize. Evaluate all plugins and leave only those that are really needed. It can also be considered as an alternative to the current plugins, which are better written, optimized and do not affect the speed of the site so much. In some cases, the speed is related to the victim. Don’t overload your website with too many active plugins that are not needed at 1000%.

One more thing — many plugins add their own javascript and css files needed for the operation of the plugin. Loading these files in itself loads the loading, and it’s a good idea to consider optimizing the loading of all scripts, file minimization, and caching. One great plugin is Autoptimize for example.

4. Cheap hosting

Although trying to find the lowest cost solutions is a goal for many businesses, this is not a good strategy when it comes to choosing a hosting provider for your website. From uninterrupted time to security, the hosting partner is what ensures that your website continues to exist. If you have chosen a cheap plan, this may be due to the fact that you are just starting out and do not need additional resources or features to start the site.

However, the website will grow over time and if you stick to a cheap hosting plan, the site may start to suffer. Server resources such as CPU time, RAM, and storage will run out quickly, slowing response time and increasing loading speed.

Cheap plans are extremely popular, and as a result, a shared server often hosts hundreds, even thousands, of websites, which inevitably affects performance.

We fully understand that many business owners and other WordPress users have a limited budget when it comes to developing and hosting their website. But the hosting decision is the key to the success of your website. Invest in a good web hosting company.

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5. Non-optimized images

Images are an important part of any website and especially for online stores. We have seen many websites that have images with huge sizes of 1,2,3 or even 4–5 MB per photo. Each kilobyte counts when loading the page. This is especially true when the site is visited by mobile devices that use a slower Internet connection. Important for the images on the site are:

1. The photo should be optimized as a resolution — there is no need for a 1920 × 1080 image if the site displays it with a width of 500px, for example. A lower resolution also means a smaller file size that will be downloaded from the browser.
2. The image is optimized as a file size — any unnecessary meta information can be removed, the image can be compressed so as not to lose quality and in combination with the optimized resolution can be reduced from 2MB to 120kb, which is completely okay to be placed on the site.

We recommend that before uploading a photo to WordPress, you compress it via https://tinypng.com/ — a great free service that optimizes and compresses PNG and JPG images without loss of quality by reducing the size by up to 70%!

6. Bonus

• Problem with the theme — it is possible that the theme you are using is outdated and non-optimized — always use the latest version of the theme. If the theme itself is not well written and uses too many scripts and styles, it is good to consider using another theme.
• You use a lot of third-party scripts — these can be Facebook, Google, Hotjar, CrazyEgg, digital marketing services, etc. — Almost all indicate that their scripts should be placed in the header of the site, which inevitably affects the loading speed. Carefully review all these additional scripts, remove the ones you don’t use, and move the rest to the footer of the site. Keep in mind that some services need to be in the header to report correctly. If you do not know which scripts to keep in the header, you can contact us for a consultation.
• The site is infected with malicious code — this is not only a threat to the security of the site / business, but also to its users. Google and all search engines often penalize such sites by declining search results or even, in extreme cases, blacklisting the domain and removing it entirely from the results. It’s important to keep all themes, plugins, and WordPress up to date — updates often fix security vulnerabilities. If you suspect that the site is infected, you can contact your hosting provider, who can scan the site and, if necessary, clear it of malicious code.

Final words

There are many reasons for a website to be slow. You can start checking for the factors we talked about above to understand what makes the site load endlessly, and then do whatever it takes to optimize.

The original article: 5 common reasons why WordPress is slow