WordPress is one of the leading content management systems in the market. It is so useful that companies big and small choose it to manage their website and all their digital content.
One reason why WordPress is so successful is that it is very simple to use, and it has unlimited flexibility. Almost anything that you can think of, there is probably a WP-Theme, plugin, or addon that will get the job done.
Setting up your WordPress website should be easy but when you set up your website for the first time, it is normally fairly speedy. Soon after you add more content, more features, more add-ons, and try different themes, your WordPress website speed quickly begins to slow down.
A slow website is an unsuccessful website, and today’s Internet user simply doesn’t have time for your site to load. We must also add that it is seen as vastly unprofessional and amateurish to have a site that doesn’t quickly load. It basically makes your business look like it is operated by people who do not know what they are doing.
We are not here just to tell you the bad, but instead, we will offer a handful of ideas that have been known to increase the website speed of a sluggish WordPress Site.
Do A Website Assessment
Step 1 is to take a look at your site with the goal of eliminating any features that you do not get much use out of having activated.
We all know the kid in the candy store approach to running a site, especially when you have a tool as powerful as WordPress. With such a content management system, there are so many features that you can add and turn on, so many of us try everything. Some of us will purchase or add many Third Party functions to get greater use. One issue with many of these features is that they slow down your WordPress site.
So, step 1 is to do an audit of everything that is activated on your site. Figure out if you really need it, if it serves an important purpose if you can deactivate and delete the functions, add-ons, and themes that just slow down your site to a halt.
Basically, trim down the fat, leave what you truly need, and end up with a lean mean webpage serving machine.
Too Much Multimedia!
Now, here is a scary one that many people will not be a fan of doing. We all have been taught via SEO gurus the importance of bounce rate. For those who lack familiarity with the term, your bounce rate is how much time the average user spends on your time before leaving. It is thought that for most sites, you offer a better user experience if the average user spends a lot of time on your site.
One way that web designers get more engagement and keep users on their site is by having a lot of different forms of media. In most cases, this means having quality images, having video, and even having audio. The thing about these media choices is that they take a lot of resources to serve, and are a major bottleneck for many WordPress sites.
Again, pay attention to what you really need, what is just extra, and what you can get rid of to speed up your site. You might determine that all your media choices are important.
One solution would be to use lower resolution images, videos, and compressed audio. These options can reduce the load time of your site, but for some site owners, this is just not something they are willing to do, which is perfectly fine because the next option we will give you might solve so many of your issues.
What Does Your WordPress Site Call Home?
This question might not make immediate sense, but please bear with us.
Let’s establish a few places that your website might call home. First, we have established that you are using WordPress as your content management system, but this system must be hosted somewhere on a server. There are 3 major ways to host a website: (1) Shared Hosting (2) Virtual Private Server (VPS) (3) Dedicated Server.
Where you host your website has many implications, especially as your site sees more traffic from users.
The majority of small-time sites are hosted via Shared Hosting, and this means that you and many other websites are all using the same server, you have the same IP address, and you are splitting resources between everyone else on this server. Can you get how this could cause a website to slow down?
When most website owners are interested in becoming a bit more professional, they move to a Virtual Private Server (VPS) because it gives them better resources, more memory, greater storage space, more bandwidth (meaning you can transfer data and serve web pages a lot faster, and to more people at the same time), a dedicated IP address which helps to individuate your site from others, and the ability to better use services like mass email, with the ability to truly go under the hood and control things.
When a site is truly successful, needing speed, needing to be completely free of shared resources, then nothing competes with a dedicated server because you are the only one on this server. You can even attach multiple URLs to this server, purchase extra IP addresses, and have domain over everything.
Why have we taken you around the world on server nerd talk? Because if you have eliminated many unneeded resources if you have cleared your cache, if you have done all the updates on your WordPress site and it is still slow, then it is time to think about upgrading to a host for your site.
Website Speed Troubleshooting Tips Conclusion
One last tip, if you have done an audit, removed some fat, and pages are still slow to load, one trick that is successful is to add a caching plugin. Caching allows your site to use fewer resources to serve a page to users, which will reduce the amount of work and resources your site will use.
If you give all of these ideas a try, then there is no way that your WordPress website will remain slow.
