Ever wondered about why your wordpress business website is running that slow, you may have hired expensive programmers and are now confused as if what went wrong. It may have started with great speeds and has hit rock bottom over time. Well, you are not alone with this wordpress based slowness and there may be nothing wrong with the wordpress itself. So, where the problem ?
Why is your wordpress website loading slow?
Slow Loading / Laggy WordPress Website Pages?
Slowness in WordPress exists at various levels. So how to Boost Performance?
The problem can be discussed in detail, but that detail could take us days worth of writing resulting in tons of pages to read. And we want to keep it simple and to the point.
So, lets talk about the common issues that could result in a slow wordpress website resulting in poor business interaction and how we can boost the performance of a wordpress installation.
Slow Hosting Service
This is one of the major root cause of small business websites. When you go with a shared hosting or even a VPS, the chances of it pperforming poorly are very high if the hosting company has not configured it properly. To be true, almost every shared hosting is overloaded plus is allocated to customer with limited resources and every VPS is not configured for speed out of the box. For a rough estimate, a well optimized VPS can perform 4 times faster than the regular one. Upgrading from a shared hosting to VPS or optimizing VPS for better performance can instantly boost the performance, but if you are on budget, there are other options as well.
Missing Caches
A properly cached website runs much faster and can handle multiple folds of traffic. But not everyone know about different level of cache that are available on a server. Website cache can be enabled at different levels, such as CDN, apache/nignx cache, opcache, database cache, software based object cache, page cache. Not all caches can be enabled all together on a dynamically load websites such an an ecommerce portal, but many can be, and they can be highly effective in reducing server load thus increasing website speed.
Huge Graphics
Images from stock image sites are huge, so are the images directly from a digital camera. An image can be as huge as 15MB and loading 2-3 such images may also be a reason that your website images are loading slow despite an overall low CPU consumption site. The best approach is to optimize the images, by reducing it to required dimensions and saving it in web optimized form such as jpg or even better webp. Optimized images not only improves the website responsiveness, but will also lower your overall bandwidth usage.
Programming + Database Querries
This one is a very common issue with custom coded websites, where developers do not review their code performance resulting in slow db queries or buggy programming code. Not only custom code, but even some 3rd party plugins from the WordPress Plugin library are poorly coded and may come with lots of functionality but in the end will cost you struggle with issues on the website. This can be tricky as you may require to hire experienced programmers to find and replace the slow performing programming code / db query.
Sluggish Template Performance
This goes last on this list but 70% of the sites can be half-fixed with fixes here. A wordpress theme may look beatuiful but may not be optimized for speed. If a wordpress template loads tens of css + tens of js files + tens of font files, it will be a dead start, when the website on launch will be slow and with added internal / external resources from plugins, the website may show up with low page speed score on testing tools. This is another reason to hire an experienced wordpress team to get your website developed, with years of experience, they know which themes perform better and will result in faster page load experience for the end user.