In the era of AI, everything goes very fast. To cope with this age, your website needs to load fast. Now you are thinking, “Why is my website loading slow?” If you are at this stage, you are not alone.
Today I will discuss this question, and at the end of this article you should know the answer and some proven techniques with which you can boost the loading speed.
First of all, let’s understand why WordPress websites sometimes load slow. There are various factors involved in this. I will explain some of them step by step so that you can easily check your website for any of the reasons you can find for your website.
Poor hosting
We all know that WordPress is very popular for building websites. For this reason, there are a ton of hosting providers available to host WordPress sites. Some of them are very cheap and do not care about users’ needs.
Resources in shared hosting are shared, the same resource for multiple websites. And very often it seems that during peak times servers slow down. This is one of the reasons I often see.
Old server configuration
Another reason I found many sites is server configuration. The servers run an old PHP version. In my investigation I found that when I updated the PHP version, it boosted the load time automatically.
Now you may ask why people use old PHP versions. Good question. At this point what I found was that many of the websites are very old, and they are not maintained often. They do not bother so much about that.
Large media size
This is very common to see that using very large media causes an effect on load time directly. Media is very important for any website. It gives visual comfort to the users. Now choosing the right media size without losing the quality is very, very important when it comes to loading time.
Now you may ask, how do I optimize the media size? Well, there are ways you can optimize any media. But right now I won’t go into the details. Later on, I will tell you how easily you can optimize your media.
Heavy use of plugins
It is so common that there are tons of plugins installed into a website. And I tell you this is not good. Now you might say that WordPress is popular because of the plugin feature. We can easily add new features to our website without a developer’s help. That’s true.
Now see, when it comes to plugins, we tend to download more feature-rich and more downloaded plugins, right? And it is common to anybody. So the problem is that you are using one or two features of the plugin, but the plugin may have many more features and logic. And for that, they load more scripts to do their job; the result is it slows down the site.
Inefficient data query
Data is the heart of any application. But this can be a pain point at the same time if we do not store and query data properly. Why I am saying this to you is I found that many of the sites have outdated data, like draft or revision kind of data. And showing the data using a query is poorly coded. This is a very big issue. It consumes more CPU and results in poor loading time.
Missing cache
Many of WordPress users do not implement caching into their websites. Caching can be very useful in terms of fast loading time if we can use it properly. If we want to make blazing fast loading times, cache is a must. Otherwise, every time the site loads, it will get the media file every time from the server. And getting data from the server takes time.
Not using CDNs
Almost all popular websites in the world use CDNs for serving their data fast to their users. This is another way of making a website fast. What a CDN does is whenever a user requests any data from the website, it detects the user’s location and serves data to the user from the nearest data center so that it can be delivered fast.
At this point we have some understanding of why the WordPress site is slow. Now we will discuss how we can increase site speed.
Using Good Server
If we choose a good server, this is one of the biggest boosts for speed optimization, uptime, and security as well. Because a good server comes with these solutions by default. Most of the time, you don’t need to bother about these settings unless it is necessary.
Server configuration
A good server comes with some great settings by default that are suitable for any WordPress website. By default most of the PHP versions are listed there, and you can use them as you need. But using updated PHP is highly recommended. Besides, you can manage other configurations out of the box.
Optimize media size
There are several plugin out there you can use for image optimization. When you upload images it will automatically compress the image and upload different sizes. Which is so much helpful to optimize image. EWWW Image Optimizer is one of the popular free plugin you can use right away.
Use only useful plugin
Remove unnecessary plugins from the list. Use custom code for a little improvement of your site rather than relying on plugins. Choose the right plugin for your need. Read the review before using it.
Review query
Use the query monitor plugin to check long queries. Optimize the query according to your need. Do not use outdated plugins. Make sure you keep up-to-date with the latest plugin version.
Use cache
Sometimes we can’t help using complex queries. And it slows down the site speed. Using cache can be a solution in this situation. You can choose a free and paid cache plugin. WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache, Breeze Cache, and Redis Object Cache are some of the popular plugins you can use.
Use CDN
Using CDN boosts the site speed significantly. It serves the request page quicker to the user from the nearest server to the client. And it makes a huge difference in terms of user experience.
Hope this article gives you a little grasp of WordPress speed optimization, why this happens, and how we can improve it. I wanted to throw some light on it. If this article is helpful or you need any information, please feel free to reach out to us. We will try our best to help you. Good luck!
