Site speed is one of the most important factors for successful website performance. Slow sites often drive away potential customers, who expect fast loading times on their journey to purchase goods online. That’s why it’s so vital to identify the main culprits behind slow load times and do what you can to fix them. By exploring the 7 top problems that contribute to a sluggish speed, webmasters can work out where they should start making improvements and how to achieve faster loading pages this year. With suggestions tailored to WordPress site owners, in particular, this post offers valuable guidance on achieving optimal speeds, allowing businesses to leverage their online presence and attract more customers heading into 2023.
Before we get started, check your speed.
Improving page loading times is essential for creating a great user experience, and the great news is that it doesn’t have to be expensive. These two free tools will check the speed with other page web vitals – PageSpeed Insights and Gtmetrix. These tools accurately measure how long it takes for the largest content block on your website to load (known as “Largest Contentful Paint”, or LCP). They also highlight areas for improvement including image compression, utilizing Content Delivery Networks, and scripts that could be loading faster. With these tools, there’s no excuse not to get your website pages blazingly fast!
Table of Contents
What is making my WordPress site so slow?
1 – Non-Optimized Images
It is easy to underestimate the importance of image size when it comes to web page speed. Having images that are not scaled appropriately can have drastic consequences on the experience of your website. Images should be resized, compressed, and optimized for maximum optimization. If a browser needs to load an image that is larger than what fits on the page. Extra time and resources are wasted trying to process the information. Resulting in a slower overall loading time for the website. People often think this isn’t significant until they start noticing how their bounce rates go up with their slow load times. Paying attention to how large your images are and compressing them appropriately can help maximize web performance.
Make the most of your page load times by beginning with an image already sized to fit exactly what you’re aiming to display on-screen. Doing so eliminates any delays that would otherwise come from waiting for a browser download and shrinkage!
Here are two things you can do:
- Upload an image with the same dimensions as the display space on your page.
- If you’re using the internet to post an image on a website or share it with friends. Proper sizing is absolutely essential. Not only will it look tidier and more organized, but compressing and resizing your images also helps speed up load time and store memory. Luckily, there are plenty of tools available to do so! TinyPNG, Optimole, WP Smush, EWWW Image Optimizer, and Smushit are some of the best image compression and resizing services out there.
- Defer loading – You can also defer images from loading (called lazy loading) until after the image is in the site visitors’ viewport. This can be set with an HTML attribute
Source: w3schools
2 – Not Using a Caching Plugin
A caching plugin is an essential element in protecting your website from potential slowdowns or crashes from too many requests. Though most websites require data trips between the client and server. A properly configured caching plugin can efficiently store and reuse saved data when visitors land on your page. This prevents the same request from being made twice which often leads to a delay in loading time for visitors. WP Super Cache is a popular free WordPress plugin designed to help optimize website speed. So if you’re noticing lags, this is definitely one of the fixes to consider before anything else.
3 – Not using a CDN
Hosting your web servers in the wrong location can lead to slow performance, particularly for visitors located further away from the hosting site. This is where CDNs come in; by using international peering and keeping content close to your users. They enable low latency rates, ensuring that all website visitors can access a fast-loading site regardless of their geographical position. Cutting down on physical distance isn’t the only benefit of CDNs storing static files like JavaScript, CSS, HTML, and images on external servers reduces the load on primary hosting sites, meaning all visitors can enjoy the maximum performance when using your website.
Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) offer an incredible way for websites to speed up the access of static files for web visitors regardless of their location. Rather than relying on one server to provide this content, CDNs are made up of many smaller servers throughout various geographic locations. Allowing them to store and deliver static website content more. Using a CDN not only optimizes loading performance but makes your site usable by people around the world. Web visitors experience faster load times and improved user experiences gone are the slow access times so common in international deliveries. With greater accessibility comes increased engagement and in turn conversions. An investment in a CDN could be seen as a critical component when positioning global online success.
4 – Background processes
Backups and scheduled posts or updates should work to your advantage, especially when set in low-traffic hours. Optimizing settings on these ensures that the lowest amount of impact is made on your website. For example, if you are taking a backup of your web pages. Then take a copy only of those pages which have been changed recently. This will reduce the disk space requirement and increase the speed as well. Additionally, some plugins may adversely affect performance, so it’s best to be mindful when installing them on your website. Thorough research and smart decisions can save you time and money later on.
Your WordPress website can suffer from slow page speeds if you are using resource-intensive plugins. Such plugins tend to be the ones that collect data, perform SEO functions, collect stats or create backups. Unnecessarily running these can cause a number of issues, adversely affecting performance and user experience. You don’t have to suffer through such hitches. However, with the Query monitor plugin available for free, you can quickly check which plugins on your website are the culprits taking up too many resources and slowing it down. It does this by ranking them according to speed. So you can easily identify the largest offenders and look for lighter alternatives.
5 – Bandwidth limitations
Enabling GZIP is a great way to improve accessibility for users with bandwidth limitations. By compressing files up to 90%, page loading can become drastically improved, making the web faster, more secure, and more user-friendly. This advancement is especially important when considering the plethora of those who rely on low-speed connections to access the web. What’s even better is that gaining these benefits doesn’t require an expensive system upgrade. GZIP is open-source and can be added using one of several straightforward configurations listed in Github. Making a few tweaks with GZIP will likely make an incredibly positive difference in your site’s performance and user experience!
Take your website to the next level and enable GZIP! With a wide range of available caching plugins, such as WP Super Cache, it’s easy to do. Make sure you’re set up correctly by visiting the GZIP tester with your site’s URL – if everything looks good, ‘GZIP Is Enabled’ will be declared.
6 – Too Many Requests
When it comes to improving a website’s load time, reducing the number of HTTP requests is a crucial factor. Each component and image on a page contributes to the total number of requests sent by the web browser. To simplify matters and keep this number as low as possible. Developers should ensure they have as few external CSS files and Javascript resources as possible–ideally choosing only one of each. Using Apache Ant is an effective way to combine several files into a single resource whilst Chrome Dev tools and Pingdom can be used to view the number of requests sent by plugins. These strategies could make all the difference when it comes to performance, so make sure you utilize them correctly!
7 – Unoptimized Code
As a website developer, code readability is an important consideration. Indentions in source code are especially useful for developers. As they help clarify which elements are connected and how they interact. However, to the browser that’s downloading this information, these additional characters add unnecessary data to load, leading to longer page loading times. Thankfully, there are many minifying plugins available that automate the process of removing extra characters and whitespace. Popular options include Autoptimize and WP Rocket – both of these plugins allow you to quickly trim down the size of your source code without sacrificing readability or functionality.
Utilizing Cascading Style Sheets or CSS to its fullest potential will ensure websites are loading quickly. Hence providing a better experience for their visitors. One of the essential steps when optimizing code is to use “media types” wherever possible and set non-critical CSS components like those found below the fold to load “inline” or “lazy loading”. A major performance gain can be seen after breaking out critical vs. non-critical CSS. This could include components such as background color, styling for elements that are visible within the initial viewport be it web, mobile, or tablet, and device dimensions. All these aspects work together to drastically improve page speed and performance as desired.
with Javascript (especially third-party Javascript), other resources can be prevented from loading. Consider adding a defer attribute.
In Conclusion
Fast loading times are an increasingly important factor in search engine rankings, and Google has taken this seriously in recent years. As mobile-centric browsing became more popular, Google also made website speed an aspect of mobile SERP rankings in 2018. Additionally, website speed affects visitors’ perceptions of a business’s credibility too- research from Google finds that more than half will leave a site if it doesn’t load within three seconds! Improving the speed of your site is essential for maintaining ranking positions and staying competitive with other businesses on SERPs.
No one likes falling into one of the 7 WordPress website speed traps. Following our suggestions for improvements is a great way to get your website ready for the busy year ahead and make sure that you don’t fall prey to another speed trap. Not only will it help improve your website’s performance, but it will also help boost user engagement as well. After implementing some of our time-proven tips and tricks. Your site will be ready to tackle any challenge 2021 throws at it.