The speed of your website has a significant impact on its performance and, as a result, its success.
Users who endured the evolution of the internet quickly tired of slow connection speeds, but many users don’t even know the struggle. Regardless of what side of the generational divide you find yourself on, one thing is abundantly clear: A slow website is the kiss of death for your WordPress site.
The speed with which your website loads directly impacts the likelihood of your visitors becoming regular customers or followers. Moreover, you will offer everyone a chance to engage with your material if your site is delivered quickly to visitors. Furthermore, Google considers page loading speed and server response time when ranking your website.
However, if you do not minimize the server response time, you will be giving your visitors a bad experience, and many will abandon your site before it even starts loading. Thus, if your website takes more than a few seconds to load on your laptop, phone, or tablet, you may need to make some effort to speed things up.
These reasons are why website speed is so vital. Unfortunately, while speed is a desirable trait, it is not something you can quickly attain. Here, we will take a look at the six most common issues that cause a WordPress site to load slowly.
You have an Excessive Number of Plugins Installed
Plugins are an important aspect of making a WordPress site work. Too many plugins, on the other hand, might harm a site rather than improve it. The longer you have had your site up and running, the more plugins you have probably installed.
Specifically, outdated or poorly coded plugins might decrease your site’s speed and cause the load time to increase to unacceptable levels. Furthermore, the more plugins you have, the more difficult it is for your site to load pages. This possibility is especially true for plugins with many features, including page builders and all-in-one solutions.
Thus, it is critical to regularly clean out your plugins, removing old or no longer required ones. You can get rid of the plugins you do not use and hunt for alternatives for those that you need. Sometimes, you will get lucky and find suitable options. Yet, you always want to keep functionality at the forefront of your mind.
Remember, everything with WordPress development is balance.
You are on a Low-cost or Ineffective Hosting Plan
Cheap hosting plans are another significant cause of slow WordPress sites. While cutting costs is a good goal, it is also vital to remember that you typically receive quality based on price.
Everything from uptime to security is affected by your WordPress site’s hosting. As a result, the significance of selecting a high-quality service cannot get overstated. Initially, a low-cost hosting plan would have been a viable option. However, if your site grows and your traffic and storage requirements expand, you may find that you need to change your existing plan.
Thus, switching to a WordPress hosting company and a plan that best suits your needs might drastically enhance the performance of your website.
Your Images Are Not Compressed
Understandably, you want a lot of high-quality photographs on your WordPress site. However, this necessitates the addition of numerous ‘heavy’ files to your website and server. Slower loading times result from larger file sizes, which might be a concern if you utilize excessive media.
Good thing, you may use lossless compression to optimize your photographs and speed up your site. Lossless compression allows you to compress large files without sacrificing image quality. When done correctly, picture compression can reduce page load speeds by as much as a second.
Your Website is Not Cached
When visitors chance upon your website, their browser sends a request to your server, requesting all of the site’s files, including graphics and scripts. Your pages are likely to contain various dynamic content, which takes longer to load than static information.
Caching is a technique for storing static copies of your site’s files to speed up retrieval. Response times are often slower if you do not cache your site since your server has to reply to more requests and queries to retrieve information.
This method of speeding up your website is why utilizing a cache plugin for WordPress is strongly advised.
You are using an Outdated Version of PHP
It is critical to keep your WordPress site, along with its plugins and themes, up to date for best performance. If your site still takes a long time to load despite all of its components being up to date, you may still be running an old PHP version.
Using the most recent PHP version, the fundamental programming language of any WordPress site will dramatically improve site speed. The correct hosting provider can assist with this if the servers run the most recent PHP version consistently.
If this is not the case, manually updating your PHP to the most recent version is advised. If you are operating an older site, it is best to make sure it is compatible with PHP 7.
You have Unnecessary Page and Post Redirects
Is your website new, or has it been there for a while? In the last few years, you may have deleted a few pages, switched to a different platform than WordPress or made other significant modifications. However, your old URLs may be on other sites that have connected to you, as well as search engines.
These URLs could lead to a dead website, or a red page with “301 Moved Permanently” or “302 Found”. Essentially, this implies that your server must first visit these pages before proceeding to the main one, adding to the load time.
Notably, manually updating your external links, eliminating old pages, implementing a better redirect code, or even bringing these pages back are all options for resolving this issue.
Conclusion
As the SEO industry becomes more competitive by the hour, changing one’s sail to avoid sinking altogether is required, whether through a website redesign, a professional email, or website speeding. When you use Bauertech to speed up and optimize your website, you will be taking a step toward a more competitive market position.
