Top 3 reasons why your WordPress website is slow

Are your visitors leaving your website because they felt it was slow? Is your SEO affected because of your website’s speed or rather lack of it?

What many don’t realize is that websites too need tuning in order for it to work at an optimized level. Especially after major search engines like Google changed their ranking algorithm since a couple of years ago, and most recently with their Panda and Penguin updates. Of course, also to provide a greater surfing experience for your visitors.

Why is a slow website a problem?

1. You lose visitors. You see, not all your visitors have high-speed broadband access. Most of them don’t have the patience to wait for your website to crawl open!
2. One of the criteria search engines used to rank websites is speed. So if your website is not fast enough, you lose out on SEO points.

What is making your WordPress website wlow?

Well, there are quite a number of reasons why this is so. Some of them are totally not your fault at all. But the good news is that these are easily solved. In today’s topic, I’ll highlight 3 most common reasons as well as suggestions on how to overcome them.

1. Inappropriate Hosting Plan or Hosting Provider

   Though cost is usually the number one factor why a user sign up for a particular hosting provider, that should not be the case. Often, an unbelievably cheap hosting plan is the cause of a slow website.

   Because they charged such a low hosting fees, these hosting providers tend to compensate with purchasing poor quality equipment and technology. Some would resort to stuffing as many domains as they could in an already crowded shared server. Over time, this will take a toll on the servers in the form of downtime or malicious attacks.

   There’s also the fact that your website is consuming more bandwidth than allocated. Perhaps when you first started, you only had a few visitors. Over time, as your website grows, your visitors too increase, leading to higher traffic and higher bandwidth requirement. And your current plan does not cater for that much of resources, and this will lead to a very slow website!

   Recommendation:

   Sign up for reputable web hosting providers like Bluehost and HostGator. Both these web hosts provide unlimited disk space and bandwidth as well as 24/7/365 customer support. Plus, they also offer plenty of great features to help you set up your website, for example 1-click SimpleScripts installer and even a free domain name. They also have many years of hosting experience which you could rely on to provide proven reliable services.

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   If your hosting plan is the culprit, then you may want to consider upgrading to a VPS or Dedicated Server plan. These plans provide you with more server resources thus enabling your website to handle the increased traffic. HostGator’s VPS and Dedicated Server plans are one of the more reliable and popular plans around.

2. Slow WordPress themes

   Yes, your theme may be slowing your website down. Actually, it’s not really about a slow theme or a fast theme but how well the theme has been coded. And it goes without saying that a properly coded theme will cut your loading speed down while a poorly coded theme will drag your website.

   Though it’s generally the free themes that has a higher chance of being poorly coded, some premium themes too are poorly coded, eg showing “coding errors” like missing PHP functions for example. If your website uses such a theme, you will experience not only slow loading website but also other challenges like the inability to install plugins (which may require the missing PHP functions to work).

   Recommendation:

   Check your themes before downloading and installing them. This may sound easier than actually doing it but there are a few things you can lookout for when evaluating a new theme. Things like whether it has all the necessary codes eg header and whether it works on all browsers, are simple features yet easily overlooked.

   Getting the right theme from the start saves you lots of trouble later. If you need to pay for it, by all means do. A recommended themes provider is my favorite Elegant Themes. Their themes are beautifully designed with lots of customization options while allowing you overall control of your website. And don’t worry, the themes are well coded too!

   Elegant Themes is one of the most (if not the most) affordable premium themes provider too. For only $39 per year, you get to download ALL their 77 (and counting) themes. And it comes with full support and free updates!

3. Too many plugins

   Excessive installation of plugins is another reason why your website is slow. In fact, it is fast becoming the main reason too! Many webmasters sometimes get carried away when downloading plugins. But I don’t blame them. WordPress has thousands of readily available plugins that can do all sorts of functions from improving SEO to vetting spam comments to customizing posts.

   Similar to poorly coded themes, poorly configured plugins too can slow your website down tremendously. This is usually due to conflicts as a result of inappropriate coding or perhaps the programmer has not tested the plugin fully before releasing it.

   Recommendation:

   Go slow on installing plugins so that your website can load faster. Try not to get over-excited and only download those plugins that you really need. Leave the fancy ones for later when you think you are sure that your website can handle them without compromising too much on loading speed.

   Alternatively, you can use the P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler) to measures your plugins’ performance to provide you an analysis of which plugin is causing your website to slow down. With this information, you can either choose to delete that plugin(s) or find a lighter alternative plugin. The good thing about the P3 (plugin Performance Profiler) is that you can easily uninstall it when you are done.

Many people thought that once their WordPress website is up and running, they can leave it alone and concentrate on producing good quality contents. Actually, that’s not right, and we need to conduct website maintenance once in awhile to ensure that it is optimized for SEO as well as for your visitors.

Do take the effort to keep your website working smoothly and you will be rewarded with happier visitors and an increase of traffic! You can start with my website building tips above.