[WP101] Slow Site? How to Speed Up WordPress

The more products and content that gets added to a WordPress site, the higher the chance the page speed will slow down. Here’s how to avoid that.

Quick tip: if you prefer letting specialists take care of your site, consider getting in touch with us and feel at ease! Learn more.

Why Speed Matters

Having a fast website speed is incredibly important to a successful WordPress website. If a customer spends more than a few seconds waiting for your homepage to
load, there is a much greater chance they will just click away and try another website.

Website speed is sort of the first impression for your customers. Quick page loading time means content can be accessed quickly and web pages can be navigated through easily. So it’s important that your website loading time is lightning quick.

Site speed is the amount of time it takes a web page to download its content from its website hosting server and display it on the desired web browser. This is a lot of information to process, and Google research has shown that people will lose interest If site loading times last more than 400 milliseconds.

It’s important to have a fast site speed as well since website loading time can directly impact your business sales and success. Site speed is actually a factor in the search engine algorithm, so slower sites will not be ranked as high as other pages, which directly impacts your website’s reach.

Types of WordPress Sites

Not all WordPress websites are the same. Static WordPress sites like blogs and small businesses, don’t change really often and have fewer database calls for information. These sites tend to have the fastest website speed by design.

Dynamic WordPress websites like learning management systems, and e-commerce websites are frequently changing, with information being recalled between minutes and seconds as large amounts of traffic visit these websites.

Types of WordPress Hosting

Your website site speed also depends on your type of WordPress hosting. Shared WordPress hosting can host the largest companies with millions of users for fees as low as twenty dollars a month. Because the hosting is shared, slowness will happen as other websites are sharing the same space to operate.

VPS hosting is a good option if you are more technologically advanced, or want to cut costs. However, if something breaks or stops working, it’s on you to fix the problem. Most people buy between five and fifteen dollars for virtual private server hosting.

There is also managed WordPress hosting, which takes care of all back-end server requests and offers full support options. This is the best option for anyone who wants to save time and focus more on the business.

Types of WordPress Themes

In addition to hosting, make sure you also choose the best WordPress theme for your website. A free theme will include only the features that are essential to your website and be faster.

A premium theme will include lots of helpful features and cost some money as well. However, it will be a good idea to go in and disable some of the non-used features in order to free up some space to increase the website speed.

WordPress Plugins

There are thousands of great WordPress plugins in the directory and it’s important to choose the best ones for your website. Plugins are also a major factor in website speed, as having too many can drastically slow your website speed.

It’s a good idea to load test your plugins after you install them, as some plugins are higher quality than others. High quality plugins will usually contains better code which takes up less space. Installing plugins adds more code to your WordPress website and the more code your page has to load, the slower it can load, unless it’s coded well.

Choosing well-known and high rated brands is a good way to avoid bad plugins in general. Also, it reduces the possibility of conflict with other plugins and additional resource usage, since well-known plugins tend to be high quality, multifunctional and overall less problematic.

Also, even after uninstalling a plugin, all of its data can be cached and saved due to the way it was built. So it’s important to do in and make sure the plugin data is completely gone from your website.

Caching

Caching is when your server stores files to disk or memory, so it can easily recall the content and your web pages will load faster. Caching puts less strain on the server and using fewer resources means the web pages will load faster.

There are also caching third-party plugins, both free and premium which can take care of caching if your hosting option doesn’t provide it. Enabling caching plugins can help improve your load time and give the server a break.

Two Bonus Strategies to Speed Up WordPress

Optimizing Cron Jobs

One important technical aspect are the cron jobs, which are scheduled server tasks.

This CreativeMinds WordPress admin tool works as a cron management plugin so you can pause any jobs that may be slowing down your site.

Ban Bots and Scanners

Another possible reason for server overload is malicious users trying to crash down your site.

There are many strategies to deal with this serious threat, and one of them is banning every IP that tries to reach certain pages, which provides a safety net for your site.

With 404 Improvement Console, every time a machine accesses pages you choose, its IP will be registered and prevented from accessing the URL again.

Conclusion

WordPress is a strong framework whose potential is nearly unlimited with the addition of plugins. Only poorly coded or bad plugins will slow down your website, and it only takes one.

Many websites have dozens of WordPress plugins and their site speed is not affected, but that doesn’t mean you should just install whatever you want. The number of WordPress plugins you install should be the number of plugins your website actually needs.

Following these tips like carefully selecting your WordPress hosting, WordPress themes, and WordPress plugins are all simple and easy steps to dramatically improve your overall website speed.

Caching is also an important part of site speed. There are helpful caching plugins to make sure your server never has to deal with being overloaded, and they are both free and very affordable.

WordPress Support and Plugin Installation Services

For WordPress users seeking assistance in getting a website to meet their standards, check out our support services here.

CreativeMinds offers monthly support packages to ensure your website is maintaining a high-performance and secure operations on a regular basis.

When it comes to speeding up your site with technological expertise, our team is available to help you.

Contact us for our performance and optimization analysis and we will assess what is hogging down your site’s performance and work together to make it fast!