Slow – slow – slow! If your website loads like treacle, then your visitors won’t stick around. And with Google focusing on page speed as a metric for site quality, then slow loading sites must be avoided. But if you have a slow WordPress site, how can you identify and eliminate the causes of site speed problems? Read on for some possible solutions.
Too Many Plugins
Let’s start with one of the common issues with WordPress sites – too many plugins. It’s always so tempting and so easy to keep adding features with additional plugins, but each plugin you add takes a toll on site speed. Everyone has a different idea of how many plugins are too many but there are several ways to find out for sure where any plugin problems lie. Here are some options:
- Turn off all plugins and see how fast your site loads – you will be surprised at the difference.
- Re-enable them one by one to see if there are any problem plugins.
- Find alternatives for those plugins if you really need the functionality.
Some people don’t want to leave their site naked – with no plugins enabled – even for a couple of minutes. If this is you then check out the Plugin Performance Profiler to identify the problem plugins. Enable it and you will get a neat dashboard report that identifies the causes before you switch anything off. Then go back to step 3 and check out the WordPress plugins database for suitable alternatives.
When it comes to plugins, there’s one more thing to think about. Installing the right WordPress theme could help reduce plugin overload. Some themes come with built in search engine optimization (SEO) features as well as related posts, thumbnail generation and social sharing buttons. If you have one of those themes, you can immediately eliminate 4 plugins.
Failure to Organize Your Images, Scripts and Database
A picture may be worth a thousand words but are big, beautiful pictures worth slowing your site down? I don’t think so. While we all want to use images, especially to make our blogs Pinterest friendly, large images can take a toll on site loading time. Luckily there are a few options for solving this problem.
- Only make images the size you need and do that before you upload them. Then your site won’t spend time resizing to match the dimensions you specify.
- Minify images automatically with WP-Minify, which is also built in to popular caching plugins – that way they will be compressed and will load faster.
- Host your images externally. There are lots of options for this from Amazon S3 to Dropbox and beyond. These sites function as a content delivery network and their servers take the load rather than yours.
Scripts are another problem. Javascript adds some useful functionality, but loading scripts at the wrong time can increase page load times. If you have ads from a couple of companies and are measuring website analytics with a bunch of tools, and have social media buttons too, then you have plenty of Javascript on your site. There are two ways to handle this.
- Make sure the script loads in the footer, after the rest of your content. Vladimir Prelovac’s Javascript to Footer plugin is an easy way to do this.
- Use a service like Cloudflare and enable the script management tools.
And then there’s the MySQL database that is the underlying architecture for WordPress. Everything you do on your site makes demands on this database, so you want to cut down on the number of database calls and keep your database in tip-top condition. To do this consider:
- Identifying the causes of slowdown directly in the database (there is great advice in section 8 of the WordPress Optimization guide).
- Using a database optimization plugin such as WP-Optimize to basically defrag your database.
- Repairing your database in PHPMyAdmin – your host will be able to give advice on this.
The Untold Secret: Web Host Throttling
Not many people realize it, but unlimited bandwidth on shared hosting does not extend to CPU usage. That’s why some web hosts throttle your blog (or even temporarily suspend your site) if they think it is using too many resources. The reasons for this could be your choice of theme or certain plugins. Some backup plugins seem to cause particular problems, while there are themes that have lots of little images, which take time to load.
Your web host will usually let you know if your site is being throttled and offer advice on how to fix it. Options include:
- installing a caching plugin such as WP-SuperCache
- checking and rechecking themes and plugins using some of the tools mentioned above.
- Running a site speed test using Yslow or GTMetrix to see what’s causing the problem.
- Comparing web hosts to find one that doesn’t throttle your site.
All of this can be time consuming but it’s worth it if you manage to speed up your site!
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