Why is my wordpress website so slow? 

Introduction

Studies show that 40% of website visitors abandon a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. Website loading is so important that big tech like Amazon relentlessly try to make their website faster. Faster website gives your website more visibility and search engines love to rank it higher. 

 

When it comes to wordpress websites a lot of users face slow website problems. It’s not the problem of WordPress. It is caused because of the slow wordpress theme, poor hosting provider, large images etc.

 

In this article we are going to give you a more detailed view and all solutions to fix your slow website.

How to know my wordpress website is slow

When you get your website first thing you should check your website speed. According to Google they only want to rank websites which have good performance scores (90+). Google has their own free tool to check performance called “Page Speed Insights”. 

You just need to search page speed insights on google and after that put your website url. It will show everything about your website like performance score, accessibility, best practices and seo. It shows both mobile and desktop. Mobile and desktop scores can be different and both scores should have more than 90+ . 

There are also other tools like Pingdom and GTmetrix that show good results and actionable recommendations. 

Why is my wordpress website so slow to load?

The loading time plays a crucial role in your wordpress website to get good user experience. There are some common culprits include sluggish wordpress themes, poor hosting provider, larger image assets, misconfigured caching plugins. 

5 Reasons for Your Slow WordPress Site and Its Solution

If you already checked and became sure that your website is slow then these are the 8 possible reasons and their solutions to fix them.

1. Unreliable Hosting Provider

Many people ignore the web hosting part. Often people get confused from some advertisements or choose bad options for their website. Your website is an important asset for your business growth. If you share your website link to others and they can’t open or take a lot of time to open you may lose a lot of money.

Don’t choose a shared hosting. If another website gets a lot of traffic from the same shared hosting it will impact your website performance. 

So first choose a good hosting provider. Always choose managed hosting because you can get better website protection, automatic backup and other advanced security.   

 

To avoid the WordPress slowness issue you can use one of our recommended hosting providers. (these are not affiliate links)

  1. Bluehost
  2. Hostinger
  3. Kinsta
  4. WPEngine
  5. Siteground

2. Sluggish Themes

There are thousands of free and paid themes when it comes to WordPress. But among them it’s mandatory to pick the lightweight and fast wordpress theme. Some heavy themes have extra animation, a lot of unnecessary features which cause the slowness of your site. 

Some themes have lots of code that occurs to load websites faster. Because the more inefficient the code, the slower your website becomes. 

Here are a few themes that we recommend that will make your website faster. 

  1. Hello by Elementor
  2. Astra
  3. Kadence
  4. GeneratePress
  5. Neve
  6. Blocksy

 

 

3. Unnecessary Plugins

Every plugin adds some code to your website. We already discussed how being loaded with lots of code makes your website slower. Always try to check your installed plugin option in your wordpress dashboard and update the latest version. 

We always recommend installing the absolutely necessary plugin and uninstalling the rest of it. 

 

4. Larger Image Issue

One of the common issues we find while troubleshooting slow websites is larger images. Not optimizing images can cause major page speed for slowing down your website. 

Unoptimized images take more space than is needed. To optimize your images you can follow these steps:

  1. You can use some free and paid tools to optimize website images. For example, image optimizers like Tinypng, Compress now, Adobe Photoshop, iloveimg.com give great service. 
  1. Resizing your images is another option to make a faster website. Keep in mind what section your website needs and how much size for that part. For example, Blog post image size 1200 X 630 pixels. 
  1. WordPress lazy load video plugin can be a great useful tool for reducing loading time. 

 

 

5. Caching

Whenever we visit a website the browser saves our website’s data the first visit of the website. Caching is another reason why your wordpress website is so slow. 

You can speed up your website just by installing plugins. Our recommended caching plugins are Autoptimize, WP Rocket and W3 super Cache.