Fix Slow WordPress: 11 Tips to Boost Performance

It can be quite frustrating to watch your WordPress website move slowly. At CanadaCreate, we prioritize website speed, and we’ve noticed that usually, one significant problem isn’t the cause of sluggish sites.

In reality, your business is directly affected by website speed. Site speed is considered by Google in search rankings. Additionally, research has revealed that a one-second delay may cause conversion rates to drop by 7%. As a result, revenue is lost while users wait for pages to load.

That’s why we’ve compiled this extensive set of expert tips for speeding up your WordPress website. We use the same techniques at CanadaCreate to ensure our website is extremely fast. Also, these tips have assisted many readers in accelerating their slow websites.

Why Is a Slow WordPress Website a Problem?

Everyone knows how annoying it is to wait for a slow website to load. Those moments seem endless, and most visitors won’t stick around. Consistently, studies indicate that if websites don’t load fast, users will leave them after only a few seconds.

The impact goes far beyond user frustration. Research from Akamai shows that a 100-millisecond delay in website load time can hurt conversion rates by 7%. For an e-commerce site making $100,000 per day, that single second of delay could cost $2.5 million in lost sales annually.

Here’s what slow loading speeds actually cost your business:

• Lost conversions:Each second of delay results in a 7% reduction in conversions.
• Fewer page views: Slow sites see 11% fewer page views
• Damaged reputation:A decrease of 16% in customer satisfaction is seen.
• Lower search rankings: Google uses Core Web Vitals as a ranking factor
• Reduced mobile traffic:Over half of mobile visitors (53%) will abandon sites needing more than 3 seconds to load.

With its Core Web Vitals update, Google elevated site speed to a key ranking consideration. This implies sluggish sites not only experience visitor losses, but are also demoted in search results, which curtails the main channel for organic visitor acquisition.

From our experience at CanadaCreate, the transformative effects of improved speed on website performance are clear. Consequently, pinpointing and resolving speed bottlenecks isn’t merely advisable; it’s vital for your online growth.

Determining Your Website’s Speed and Its Causes

Running a speed test provides a quick way to assess your site’s loading speed. Consult our guide on conducting website speed tests correctly for the tools you can use.

To account for varying internet conditions, we suggest running the test a minimum of 3 times and averaging the resulting data. Testing via multiple speed test utilities might be useful as well.

Give particular consideration to the page load metric, as it indicates the time users must wait for your web page to fully display.

When your site’s load time exceeds 2 seconds, determining the cause becomes necessary. Most speed testing platforms highlight significant issues, allowing you to examine granular reports.

Now you’re aware of your website’s speed, so determining performance bottlenecks is the next goal. Luckily, auditing your website performance can be achieved via numerous effective methods.

For example, you can use GTmetrix to improve WordPress site performance by running it as a plugin or by visiting their website to quickly run a speed test on any website.

GTmetrix scores your website, quickly showing its rating.

A ‘Detailed report’ link reveals potential problems; green items are fine, but orange or red ones slow your site.

Clicking on an issue reveals precisely what requires fixing.

Let’s examine the core problems that slow down WordPress and how you address them in closer detail.

Your WordPress Website Is Not Up to Date

You need to make sure that your WordPress website is up to date, and that includes the WordPress software as well as your plugins and themes. Developers often release updates to optimize performance and fix bugs.

We recommend using the proper update order, starting with WordPress core and then updating your plugins and themes. You can do this conveniently from the Dashboard » Updates page in your WordPress admin area.

For comprehensive details, examine these focused tutorials:

• Beginner’s Tutorial: Methods for Updating WordPress Securely
• A Practical Guide to Updating WordPress Plugins (Procedure)
• Updating a WordPress Theme While Preserving Customisations: A How-To

WordPress Caching Is Absent

Each visitor to your site prompts WordPress to assemble pages live from its MySQL database. Database queries and script executions yield a final HTML page, displayed in the visitor’s browser.

When concurrent requests flood your site, the database gets overloaded, making loading noticeably slower.

Using a WordPress caching plugin offers a prime avenue to accelerate your site through process streamlining.

Once generated, the HTML for each page gets saved in a cache, avoiding repetitive rebuilding for frequent visitors. These users simply access the cached copy.

The reduced load on your server translates to boosted page load speeds.

Refer to these guides to see how the most-used caching plugins are installed:

• WordPress WP Rocket: Installation and Setup, Fully Explained
• Beginner-Friendly Guide: W3 Total Cache Installation and Configuration
• Easy method for Installing and Configuring WP Super Cache for Novices

Browser caching also becomes available. It keeps a local copy of pages and other assets on user machines. Re-visits happen at a faster speed.

CDN is not being used

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) caches your files on multiple servers around the world. Besides caching the generated HTML pages, it also stores all of the other resources needed to view the page, including images, CSS stylesheets, JavaScript files, and more.

This content is served from the server closest to each user. This offers big speed gains if you have visitors from many locations around the world, as we do at CanadaCreate.

If you are not already using a CDN, then you can choose from many excellent WordPress CDN services:

• Bunny.net is the best WordPress CDN with servers spread across the world. Our team at OptinMonster uses it because their pricing is very affordable for small businesses.
• We use Cloudflare because they offer a powerful WordPress CDN with a firewall to protect your site from threats.
• We like Envira CDN because it’s a simple and affordable CDN built specifically to speed up images. It activates with a single click, avoiding the complex setup of other services.
• We also recommend Sucuri, another CDN with security features we used for many years.

For more information on the benefits of a Content Delivery Network, see our guide on why you need a CDN for your WordPress blog.

Too Many Files Need to Be Loaded to View the Page

Before a visitor can view your web page, their browser first needs to request and download all of the required files. This includes all of the images you want to display, stylesheets that format the page, JavaScript files that add functionality, fonts, and more.

Increased numbers of files can slow page loading, particularly if files are large or reside on slower third-party servers.

These are called HTTP requests, and we have written a detailed tutorial on how to reduce HTTP requests in WordPress.

Your browser’s Inspect tool offers one valuable method to spot slow HTTP requests. The tool’s Network tab details the loading resources, while the Time column indicates load duration for each resource.

By clicking the Time column’s header twice, the slowest resources will appear at the top of the list. Consider anything taking over 0.5 to 1 second as a potential cause of site slowdown; use this only as a rough benchmark.

Consider several solutions presented here to remedy this and accelerate your website.

For starters, CSS and JavaScript files often include extraneous elements such as whitespace and developer notes. Reduce these file sizes by minifying them; minified files load substantially faster.

A further issue stems from loading all images for an entire page regardless of initial visibility. Employing lazy loading for images improves page load times through loading just the initially visible files.

Lazy loading can be applied to videos and to the comments area at a page’s foot.

Our earlier guide has further strategies on reducing HTTP requests for more ideas.

Your Images Are Too Large or Unoptimized

Many novice websites experience performance issues attributable to unoptimized images. The substantial file sizes of uncompressed images extend loading times significantly.

We use photo editing tools to optimize all images before they are uploaded to CanadaCreate. Image dimensions are adjusted to match their display size on the site, compression settings are modified, and the ideal image format is selected.

The goal is to achieve the smallest possible file size without sacrificing acceptable image clarity.

Consult our guide for detailed instructions on improving your images for faster web performance while retaining clarity; this will show you how.

Given their larger demands on storage and bandwidth, avoid uploading videos directly onto your WordPress site. You should instead make use of third-party video hosting platforms such as YouTube and embed those videos within your posts.

You can learn more within our tutorial explaining why uploading videos to WordPress directly is not advised.

Your WordPress Database Is Unoptimized

Over time, adding and removing content can bloat your WordPress database with extraneous data, leading to performance degradation. Load times can be severely affected.

To maintain peak website speed, it is vital that you perform routine WordPress database maintenance and optimization.

Using the free version of WP-Optimize is a great way to clean your database. As well as database maintenance, this plugin can compress images, eliminate unused image sizes, cache content, and reduce HTML, CSS, plus JavaScript file sizes.

Inside your WordPress dashboard, you’re able to select which database management processes it should carry out using the WP-Optimize » Database page.

For example, you can improve WordPress performance by optimizing database tables, removing unnecessary post revisions, clearing auto-draft posts, and eliminating spam and trashed comments, among other tasks.

You can then run these tasks by clicking a single button at the top of the page.

For details on how to use this plugin, see our guide on how to optimize your database.

You Are Running Slow or Inefficient Plugins

Before a page on your website can be loaded, WordPress first needs to load its core files and active plugins. If a plugin loads slowly, it affects your WordPress performance.

Keep in mind that inactive plugins will not make your website slower. Moreover, even having numerous plugins installed is unlikely to significantly impact site speed. The real problem lies with plugins behaving badly.

These are plugins that query the WordPress database more than necessary, load files from slow third-party plugins, or are simply bloated or offer more features than you need.

Our guide asks: Which WordPress plugins are slowing down your site? In it, a few methods for identifying badly behaving plugins will be discussed.

After identifying these, you might replace them with alternative plugins which are optimized to run fast. Alternatively, contact the plugin developer to get support.

Your Scheduled Website Tasks Are Not Optimized

Some vital WordPress plugins execute crucial tasks in the background; they can consume considerable server resources, and thus slow your website.

Here are some examples:

• Image optimization plugins perform image compression using server resources.
• Website-crawling plugins checking for broken links will check each link on your whole site.
• Plugins that scan for malware by looking for dangerous code in your files and database.
• Backup plugins compress and duplicate a large amount of data for safety purposes.

Given that these activities are essential, plugin deactivation is not an option.

However, you can schedule these important tasks at low-traffic times when your site has fewer visitors. You can also adjust how frequently these plugins run to reduce unnecessary load on your server.

For instance, schedule backups just once or twice a week after publishing articles if you publish only one or two articles each week.

Plugin settings allow configuration of the schedule for each task.

You can also see our guide on how to view and control WordPress cron jobs to learn how to configure regular tasks performed by WordPress.

Your WordPress Hosting Is Slow

Your WordPress website will invariably be slow if your hosting provider is slow or unreliable, no matter how extensively you optimize it. Due to this, we advise against utilizing free hosting for an actively used business website.

Instead, most small websites can start with a shared hosting plan with a reputable and affordable hosting company like Bluehost or Hostinger.

However, shared hosting is often too limited for larger websites with a lot of traffic, like CanadaCreate. That’s why we use SiteGround’s Enterprise Cloud Infrastructure for our own website.

We ran detailed speed checks using leading WordPress hosting firms; these tests measured response from various worldwide locations and gauged each host’s ability to handle high traffic levels.

In our fastest WordPress hosting guide, the outcomes of our performance analyses are available.

Switching hosts represents a significant undertaking; additionally, you could check our guidance outlining crucial signals that indicate it’s time for a WordPress hosting change.

Server Software Needs an Update

PHP and MySQL database management, both crucial to WordPress operation, are installed on your web server.

These programs, just like WordPress and plugins, are periodically updated; performance improvements, bug fixes, security updates, and new capabilities are frequently introduced. Employing the newest releases can improve your website speed.

A faster PHP version also exists, tailored for optimal speed, particularly useful when sites receive substantial traffic.

The SiteGround team produced Ultrafast PHP, an optimized PHP variant. As CanadaCreate is hosted by SiteGround, our website speed is boosted as a consequence.

Our guide describes how speed enhancements can happen via PHP & MySQL.

Professional assistance for website speed optimization is often beneficial.

Pinpointing the underlying causes of slow websites and fixing those concerns is often time-intensive, particularly for non-technical people; therefore, professional assistance from Seahawk Media Services could be considered.

They will thoroughly troubleshoot your performance issues using their website speed test and tools like GTMetrix and PageSpeed Insights.

Using this report, they will then implement tested strategies to boost your page load times, refine server efficiency, and enhance the technical SEO elements of your WordPress setup; this encompasses some of the approaches reviewed here.

Furthermore, they can optimise your active plugins, resolve server-side problems, tidy up your WordPress database, oversee image compression, and offer additional optimisations.

The starting price for Seahawk’s website speed optimisation package is only $499.

Hopefully, this explanation has assisted you in grasping the causes of a slow WordPress site and how to rectify them. You might also find value in our guide about plugin impacts on site load time, or our insights for elevating your WordPress site health check score.

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