Why is WordPress so slow? Actually, out of the box, WordPress is very fast. What slows down WordPress websites is adding unnecessary features, cheap hosting, and poor code.
In this article, we will explain how to speed up your WordPress website.
Nobody enjoys using a slow and buggy website. Especially not on their mobile devices.
Website performance improves conversions, SEO, and visitor satisfaction. In fact, according to research, over half of the visitors will abandon a website that takes longer than 3s to load.
This is why speeding up your website is especially important if you are selling products or promoting your services.
Here are some recommendations that can help speed up your WordPress website.
This is the most common performance problem that we encounter.
Using large and inefficient images and videos can make or break a website.
Some plugins can bring WordPress websites to a grinding halt. While there is no magic number, we usually recommend having no more than 10 plugins installed.
Not all plugins are created equally, and having less than 10 doesn’t guarantee perfect results, but it’s a good rule of thumb to follow. The number of plugins is usually not as important, it’s more about how well the plugins are made.
But how do you identify which plugins are the most resource-intensive? The best way to identify resource-intensive plugins is by using New Relic, but this is a paid tool.
If that’s out of your budget, you can also try downloading and installing the Query Monitor plugin, and follow this guide for identifying slow plugins.
Once you identify slow and inefficient plugins, you should uninstall them, or find an alternative.
A content delivery network is a term used to describe distributing your website files closest to the user.
While it’s not a requirement for businesses that target local visitors, it can speed up your website slightly. If you are targeting a global or international user base, a CDN is a must. It will serve your website closest to where your visitor resides.
Another benefit of using a CDN service is that it can help protect your website from hackers and distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks. It can also provide uninterrupted service even if one or more of the CDN servers go offline due to hardware malfunction giving users some redundancy.
The best part is that you can sign up for a free CDN service with Cloudflare. It’s quick and easy to configure and it will speed up your WordPress website, as well as protect it from hackers.
Installing a high quality caching plugin is a must, especially for WordPress.
Since WordPress is a dynamic website technology (as opposed to static), it talks to the database server each time a user visits the website. Caching resolves this issue by storing web pages for quick retrieval, bypassing the call to the database.
Most good caching plugins also offer functionality like minification (making the website pages smaller) and combining files for fewer trips to the server.
All of these methods significantly speed up website performance.
There are quite a few free caching plugins used to speed up WordPress, but our recommended caching plugins are WP Rocket or W3 Cache. We prefer WP Rocket due to its ease of use and great performance, but W3 is also great if you are looking for a free option.
Some hosting providers such as Pantheon and SiteGround, offer their own caching solutions. If a hosting provider doesn’t have caching capabilities and you need something simple, check out Cloudflare’s WordPress APO service (paid product). This product helps boost the lackluster performance of shared and slow hosting plans.
A good quality hosting provider can make or break your website’s performance. The old saying “you get what you pay for” definitely applies in this case. Since WordPress requires a bit more juice to run optimally, it needs more robust hosting.
Better hosting providers will allocate more resources to your website, and also configure their servers for better WordPress performance. Some of them will also offer caching and CDN services which will further speed up your WordPress website.
There are many great hosting providers, but we recommend SiteGround, Kinsta, or TFWPH because we use them for our projects all the time.
If you need help auditing your current website and migrating it to a better hosting provider, contact us. We love helping clients speed up their WordPress websites.
Not all WordPress themes are created equally. Some themes come with a lot of bloat and can slow down websites significantly.
Themes that are simple, and professional don’t have to be bloated with features and required plugins, however. Besides a good hosting provider, having a fast theme is one of the most important speed considerations.
At Clio, we only use fast and efficient themes, which makes our websites really fast by default.
Certain plugins and themes load assets that you may not be using, you can disable them to speed up your WordPress website.
Our favourite way to achieve this is by using Perfmatters’ (premium plugin) Script Manager. It allows you to see all of the assets that are being loaded by the website, and you can disable them on a single page or all pages. This is a really powerful feature, but it’s not the only great feature Perfmatters offers. In fact, it’s packed full of features to speed up a WordPress site.
Limiting the use of external scripts, libraries and fonts can also be achieved by using a plugin like WP Asset CleanUP. The free version of this plugin has some powerful features that can help you see which assets are being loaded so that you can disable them. The premium version offers more functionality.
You can also preload assets for better performance using these plugins or using a caching plugin like WP Rocket and W3 Total Cache.
Keeping your WordPress website updated is not only a good idea from a security perspective, but it can also speed up your website.
For example, PHP 8.0 can handle 50% more requests (or transactions) per second than PHP 7.0.
Plugins and WordPress version updates also often address performance issues and try to improve performance as well as functionality with every new release. This is why it’s a really good idea to keep your WordPress core, plugins, and PHP versions up to date.
If you need some help with this, we offer WordPress maintenance plans.
Generally speaking, WordPress page builders like WP Bakery, and Elementor will slow down your website. They contain various libraries and assets that tend to slow down website load times.
We still feel that Elementor offers some really unique functionality and we use it for our builds. At Clio, we ensure that all unnecessary assets are removed to keep things light and efficient. Elementor can be really fast if it’s tuned for performance and the plugin author has committed to making performance improvements their main priority.
If you prefer using WordPress page builders but are concerned about performance, you can check out GenerateBlocks and Oxygen which are very fast but don’t offer as much functionality as Elementor. You can also tune your Elementor website for better performance by following our guidance on improving Elementor performance.
We hope that the tips in this article will help you speed up your WordPress website. Our recommendations and techniques are based on years of experience helping small businesses.
At Clio, we have helped many clients improve their speed scores. We have been developing WordPress websites since 2011, and have a lot of experience improving website performance.
Contact us if you would like us to help you speed up your WordPress website.
You can improve your WordPress website performance by:
Performance plugins can help speed up a WordPress website, but they are not necessary. A fast theme, a good hosting plan, and tuned assets will help speed up WordPress load times without plugins.
There could be a number of reasons why a WordPress website is loading slowly. Usually this is due to a slow theme, or using inefficient images or videos. In order to find out exactly why a website is loading slowly, perform a test using gtmetrix and fix any issues that are recommended by the tool.
