Slow Loading WordPress Website? What Could Be the Reason?

Description: These are the five most significant reasons why your WordPress site is slow loading. A solution to each is provided to help you optimize your website for fast performance.

If your WordPress site is taking over 3 seconds or more to load, you are losing money. Benjamin Franklin famously penned the phrase ‘time is money’ in his Advice to Young Persons Intended for Trade. How true that is these days when time is measured in seconds and milliseconds.

Fifty-three percent of visitors to your site will leave if it doesn't load within three seconds. Don’t believe it? Visit the Wikipedia site and see how fast it is.

You probably don’t need to be told how important page loading times are, so a more pertinent question would be your WordPress website is loading slowly. There are a few major causes of a slow WordPress site, and this article will explore them and their solutions.

You can find the result 1.62 second loading time with AssociationX Theme by D5 Creation in this site. All of the D5 Creation Themes are optimized for Speed, SEO and Security. These are the simplest Themes, too. You can check with the official WordPress Approved Free Versions before using the Extended.

5 Top Causes of Slow Loading WordPress Sites (And How to Fix Them)

1.  You Have Too Many Plugins (Trim Unnecessary Stuff) 

Plugins are fantastic bits of code that run on your site to extend its functionality and do lots of other things. When you use a WordPress site builder to create your website, it gives you options to add plugins to add custom functions.

The problem is that these plugins need resources to run, as well. They will be sending continuous requests to the database, and it makes page load times much slower. Consider that many of your clients will be using mobile devices; do you need to show them that huge image slider? 

WordPress site plugins are an excellent addition to any site, but they usually don’t add value to the client. We also tend to forget all about them once we are finished, and some are coded very poorly. 

Solution

Go through your website with a fine-toothed comb and weed out any unnecessary or resource-intensive plugins in there. You can even use plugins to check the performance of other plugins, and then remove them when you’re done.

2.  The Media on Your Site is Not Optimized (Embed Media and Use Lazy Loading)

No website can hope to entice today’s graphical consumers without media like photos and videos. High quality, high definition media does wonders for conversion, but it eats up your hosting bandwidth and slows client-side page loading.

Even with lightning-fast hosting, such ‘heavy’ media files take a toll on resources. Rather than let them go, you can use a few tricks to speed up your WordPress site.

Solutions

1. Compress your media. Many media compression tools can reduce your file size by 80% or more without losing quality. You can also match image sizes and their display box sizes in pixels to cut out unwanted bulk.
2. Instead of hosting media files on your site, use video hosting services like Vimeo or YouTube to embed them. It frees up your bandwidth and improves loading times.
3. Install a Lazy Loading plugin. It directs the client to download or load only those media files they are currently viewing. When they scroll down or swipe, it downloads the rest on the go. 
4. If you have a gallery of media or substantial portions of text, e.g., client reviews and comments split them into pages for easier management.

3.  Slow Hosting (Use Dedicates, VPS or Cloud Hosting)

One of the biggest culprits of slow loading, WordPress website hosting services, directly impacts how fast your web pages load. No matter how fast the client’s connection is, if your servers can’t respond fast enough, you will lose potential conversions.

There are three types of website hosting services. Each of these responds differently depending on the resource requests.

• Shared hosting - is the cheapest and most popular hosting plan for many start-up websites. It involves sharing a host with other domains. Because the server has to juggle the incoming requests, page loading times can be really slow. Another form of this is virtual private hosting or VPS, a virtual machine on a shared server. 

• Dedicated hosting - Your domain has its dedicated server or servers whose only job is to service client requests from your site. It allows you full customization, is blazing fast, but costs a lot more. It is perfect for high-traffic websites. A cheep solution is shared dedicated or VPS hosting.  

• Cloud hosting - many servers run together, you get allocated a slice of the collective resources. This kind guarantees almost 100% uptime, unbelievably fast loading times, and a correspondingly high price tag. Perfect for eCommerce sites that would need flexible scaling options.

Having a low priority domain hosting service slows everything down for you and your clients.

Solution

Upgrade to a better, faster, and more responsive WordPress hosting service. If you can afford it, choose a dedicated or cloud-hosted option. Remember that even a 99% uptime can cost you 3 days of downtime. Can you afford to have your site down for 72 hours a year?

Even with a good hosting service, you can improve site loading times dramatically by enabling CDN. A content delivery network (CDN) is a series of servers in the world placed strategically to respond to requests from clients who are nearest geographically. By reducing the distance, data packets have to travel to, and from your servers, CDN improves loading times for your clients.

4.  Too Many Database Requests (Use a Caching Plugin)

When you build a WordPress site, you use a lot of assets such as libraries and extensions. These come in the form of files that get ‘called’ as needed. The problem is that these assets aren’t always synchronized.

The WordPress website's language is designed to unify all such assets, but it takes up valuable time and resources. For WordPress nerds, it can be tempting to add this here or borrow that there to reduce the workload. 

Ultimately, optimizing your WordPress website involves a similar process to the one needed for useless plugins. WordPress builds a site from scratch upon request as a dynamic website building and hosting solution. The number of calls and operations that occur then slow down the site every time a user requests a page. 

Solutions

1. Check what assets are outdated or are no longer needed and remove them.
2. Try to combine different assets to make database calls less frequent.
3. Use a caching plugin. Such a plugin stores an image of the site for fast initial loading.

5.  Malware and Image Theft (Use Anti-Malware and Blocking Tools)

Viruses and hacking attacks on your website have the potential to wreak complete havoc. Besides being bad for business, they can even cause your site to be shut down. 

Whatever such malware seeks to do in your site, the only course of action is to take up defensive and offensive measures.

Solutions:

1. Use WordPress malware removal services regularly to scan for and remove any security threats on your website.
2. Use protection services such as Cloudflare, which helps to block malicious requests to your site.
3. When you create a WordPress site, host it in a secure IP address.

Conclusion 

A slow-loading WordPress website is annoying and a menace to business. Consumers have a lot of options nowadays, and they do not hesitate to move on to the next site if yours does not fulfill their expectations. 

Don’t lose business because of such a problem that has such simple fixes. What tricks have you been using to optimize your website for fast loading? Please let us know in the comment below.