Do you feel proud to own a functional WordPress website and dream of having a remarkable online presence, but it’s not happening? Well, this could be because your WordPress site running slow, which is indeed a nightmare for many of us.
Finding why is WordPress running so slow is important if you want to experience great outcomes from your website. However, the job isn’t easy as multiple components are responsible for this. In this post, you have a chance to learn about the top 10 reasons behind a slow-running website.
Reasons Why My WordPress Site is Slow & Its Solutions
A sluggish WordPress site can jeopardize all your development efforts because such a website will fail to fetch the attention of the visitors, hook them for a long, and even rank high in SEO.
Let’s warn you first. If you’re trying to figure out why WordPress is so slow, there are many culprits causing this nuisance. We will discuss some of the most common ones next.
Reason #1 – WordPress version is outdated
Version updates are here for a reason, and if you’re not updating the version, you’re inviting the slow performance of your exclusively created WordPress site. With each update, you get to enjoy advanced security patches, cutting-edge features, and improved performances. Missing out on an update is like putting your leg on an axe.
The best way to avoid this hassle is to activate the automatic version updates in its wp-config.php file. With version updates, we also recommend plugin and theme updates.
Reason #2 – Your images are not well optimized
Images are the key parts of a site and play a crucial role in improving the user experience. But, if you’re using images that are too large and consuming too much space, the website’s performance will certainly slow down. Heavy images take time to load.
So, you need to make sure that images are optimized and compressed perfectly. Loss y compression is a great way to have images that will help a website to grow rather than making it super slow. Alternatively, you can use image optimization plugins like Smush or ShortPixel for this purpose.
Reason #3 – Troublemaker plugins or themes
We know that WordPress is famous because of its wide library offering multiple plugins and themes. But, using any random theme or plugin is likely inviting slow speed.
If the picked plugin or theme is not compatible with the current website layout, the direct impact of this incompatibility will be on the website speed.
This is why experts recommend using a staging site and testing plugins and themes here before deploying them directly on the live site. You can stage your live site with InstaWP for speedy testing.
Reasons #4 – Caching is not active on the website
If caching is not active on your site, then it’s certain that slow performance will stop the growth of your site. Caching is important for WordPress because WordPress is based on MySQL and PHP, and both of these technologies have the tendency to get bloated.
Caching prevents this from happening. So, even if you find caching difficult, don’t overlook it. You may try WP-Optimize to improve your website’s efficiency using caching.
Reasons #5 – Your website is receiving too many HTTP or API calls
You may not know, but the plugins and themes that you’re using on your site are sending too many HTTP and API calls. And this is what can cause the speed issues.
Excessive API and HTTP calls exert great pressure on the site and make it slow. So, try to find out how many HTTP and API calls your site is making and deploy measures to reduce them.
Reason #6 – The website has too many scripts and stylesheets
The speed of a site will be below the standard if there are too many scripts and stylesheets used. You need to make sure that the website code is clean and doesn’t have any unwanted elements.
You can try the code minification technique for this. As the code is crisp and compact, it will have small-size Java Scripts and CSS files. So, they will load quickly, resulting in high speed.
Reason #7 – The WordPress Admin Dashboard is slow
You can’t expect a website to perform well if its dashboard is not speedy. This is why we strongly recommend you check the speed of the WordPress Admin Dashboard. The dashboard is the front-end aspect of a site, and if it’s slugging, the backend is bound to be slow.
To fix the performance issue of the WordPress Admin Dashboard, you can use the server-level APM tool. It will help you figure out the root cause behind why WordPress admin so slow and fix it instantly.
Reason #8 -Bad Hosting/Server or Poor Configurations
The server location and its configuration matters a lot when we talk about the speed of a WordPress website. If you’re selecting a distinct server for your website, then response time to likely to be higher. Also, if the website aims to target a global audience and doesn’t have CDN configured on the server, the audience will have to wait to get a proper response.
Based on the locations of the targeted audience, you need to select and configure the server. For instance, try to always deploy a server closest to the location from where most of the traffic comes.
You must consider using a CDN having global coverage to make sure that your audience, coming from every nook and corner of the world, will be able to access the content quickly. When we talk about the configuration, you need to make sure that the right kind of hardware and software is empowering the server.
Configurations like shared resources by a large pool of websites, the inability to scale automatically when traffic surges, and failure to install automatic updates are responsible for slow speed. You need to watch out for the settings and configurations for the servers when the website is not responding the way it should be. So, fix these configurations and experience great speed.
Reason #9 – No Content Delivery Network (CDN) is used
If you wish to have speedy sites, don’t forget to use CDN. It reduces the content load of the main site. It hosts the frequently requested content by the targeted audience and makes it available instantly. This way, the load time and response time of a website become better than before.
The content delivery is faster because the CDN servers are mostly located at the nearest possible location to the end user. So, the request doesn’t have to cover a long distance to reach the server. As we have already mentioned in the above point, the large distance between the servers and the end-users increases the response time for sure. CND servers reduce this distance and increase the response time.
Reason #10 – The website URLs are not redirected
A blog website can experience slow speed if you’re updating the posts and pages regularly and not redirecting the URL properly. Often, website owners forget to update the URL structure as blogs are updated.
Keep in mind that you have to redirect the URLs when you’re updating the posts, pages, and blogs. However, you need to follow the process the right way. Wrongly-done URL redirects are not at all helpful for you.
Make sure you’re not redirecting in a loop or a chain. Such sorts of URL direct will increase the load time. So, redirect the URLs the right way.
How to Identify Why My WordPress Site So Slow?
If you find your webpage loading slow once in and while, you can’t certify your website as a slow website. There are ways to confirm it officially, and these ways are:
1. Page Load Time Test
The ideal page load time is 2 seconds, and if any webpage is taking longer thin than this, it’s not good news. You can use reliable page load time testing tools to find out the actual load time of a website. Gladly, there is no dearth of options in this category. A wide range of paid and free tools are available.
2. Conduct a stress test for the website
Next, an expert-recommended way to find out whether the site is actually slow is to perform a stress test on the website. For this test, developers are advised to use load impact tools and create multiple site visit incidences for the website.
Ideally, 25 visits within 5 minutes are the right stress test condition. With this test, it’s easy to find out the website’s ability under high traffic load.
3. Use APM Tool
With APM, you can conduct speed and load testing at the same time, saving time and effort. This is recommended for situations when the speed is so slow that your website is losing grip on SEO, and you don’t have time to conduct extensive tests.
You can use the tool to test both the themes and plugins. It has unmatched compatibilities to figure out the slow performance resource while causing no disruptions on the main site. The tool is designed with so much perfection that it can easily track performance issues in external requests, slow transactions, and database queries.
4. Use stage site
Often, slow WordPress speed happens because of incompatible plugins and themes. With the help of a staging site, you can easily test the problem-causing plugin/theme and get rid of it. This solution also works to check the compatibility and real-time functionality of a WordPress theme/plugin before you deploy it directly on the live site.
InstaWP – Create Staging Sites to A/B Test Your Solutions
As mentioned above, creating staging sites are preferred way to find out why is WordPress running so slow. However, many developers avoid this step because creating a staging site can be a tedious job demanding tons of effort.
This is where InstaWP comes for help. It allows you to push/pull WordPress from the staging site, simplifying sandboxing and testing multifold.
InstaWP is a super-useful platform using which developers can create and manage multiple staging sites from a centralized platform. InstaWP allows you to:
- Use pre-built templates to develop a staging site
- Push the staging site on any of the hosting platforms later on
- Secure the staging site with SSH
- Invite other developers to work on staging sites in collaborations
- Use advanced tools like Log Viewer and Code Editor
- Manage various staging sites in one dashboard
- Create your live site’s staging version using the InstaWP Connect plugin
- Give site demos and product demos with ease
Get Your WordPress Site Up to Speed
You can’t afford to have a sluggish WordPress site, as it harms brand value and SEO ranking. As the speed of your WordPress website drops, you need to roll up your sleeves and learn the reasons behind the WordPress website running slowly. We’ve listed a few key reasons behind this.
Also, we’ve got a very viable solution, InstaWP, to recommend to you that helps developers to create a staging site and perform A/B testing. With no efforts involved, staging site development with InstaWP is quick, flawless, and highly advanced. You can have multiple staging sites for your WordPress and fix the slow speed issue.
So, don’t hold yourself back! Try InstaWP today and start to enjoy blazing speed.
