WordPress powers about 30% of all websites. That means if you’re a blogger or you run a small website, there’s a good chance you’re already familiar with it.
Unfortunately, even though popular content management platforms make speed optimization a breeze, a lot of WordPress sites are still slow. It might not seem like a big deal if your site takes a few extra seconds to load, but it is. Website speed is important for user experience, SEO, and website revenue. Even a single second can make a big difference.
That’s why we’ll outline several things you should look out for if you want a fast WordPress site.
Server Resources
Your choice of hosting could be the first problem. If you don’t get enough server resources, it’s difficult to maintain fast speeds. It’s essential to pick a good hosting provider.
According to the website hosting experts over at the Hosting Tribunal, who prepared the informative graphic below,
Mind that managed WordPress hosting is not a must-have if you want to host a WordPress website. However, it does have a lot of conveniences like more security, automatic updates, and more qualified technical support.
Excessive Plugins
Another common bottleneck for WordPress sites is plugins. Plugins are one of the great things about WordPress and these days you can find a plugin for just about anything. They let you create things you would otherwise need years of web development experience for.
That being said, too many plugins can bog down a website. Your server must spend resources to run plugins. If you have too many plugins active, they increase your load times. Using many form builder plugins can cause your website to load slower. That’s why choose one form builder WordPress plugin and you’ll see the difference in the performance.
If you’re experiencing performance issues, it could be because you installed too many plugins. Delete any you’re not using; you’ll be doing yourself a favor.
Hosting Environment
A third common issue is that you haven’t upgraded to PHP 7. PHP 7 is two to three times faster than the previous version. However, only a third of WordPress sites run on PHP 7.
Chances are your hosting provider supports PHP 7. Still, they won’t upgrade your site to it without your consent because they don’t know if your theme and plugins are compatible with PHP 7. If you’ve owned your WordPress site for a while and haven’t upgraded, you could still be on PHP 5.
You can use the Display PHP Version plugin to check if you’re still using the older version. If you’re not using PHP 7, contact your hosting provider’s support team. They can help you upgrade and make your site faster.
These are some common issues that trouble WordPress sites. There are a lot of other ways to improve website speed. Looking into them is always worth it.
WordPress users have numerous plugins that make speed improvements easy. If you want to make your website faster, you can find ways to optimize images, enable GZIP compression and server-side caching, and many other things.
And if you want to learn more about website speed itself, the infographic below has all the core info to get you started.
