Is your WordPress website taking too long to load?
Did you know that slow loading webpages can affect your business in 2 ways:
- It can affect your SEO score of your website.
- It can affect the user-experience on your website.
Don’t let this happen to you. Whenever you experience the slow loading speed of your WordPress website, you must take an immediate action and hire a web developer to fix the issue.
How to detect the loading speed of any WordPress website?
There are several online tools that are available for you to check the loading speed of your website. Some of those reliable tools are:
In this blog post, I’ve shared 6 reasons why your website may be loading slow.
#1 Too many plugins installed
The most common reason of your WordPress website’s slow loading speed could be that it has too many plugins installed.
There could be several plugins installed on your website that may not be in use. You may consider removing them in order to check if that makes any difference to the loading speed of your website.
As a precautionary note, you must consult your WordPress developer before removing any plugin which you think may not be in use but still active.
Alternatively, you may take a full backup of your website before removing the plugin yourself. Just in case, you need to restore your website, you must have the latest functional version of your website.
#2 Unoptimized images
While it’s true that high resolution images can affect the loading speed of any WordPress website badly, at the same time it’s quite hard to visualise a nice looking website in the absence of high resolution images.
In other words, high-res images do contribute in enhancing the overall look of any website, but they must be optimized well so that they don’t slow down the loading speed of webpages too.
Fortunately, there are several free & paid plugins available to optimize the images on your WordPress website.
So, if you want to use high resolution images on your website while maintaining its loading speed, you can do that.
Some of those useful WordPress plugins for image optimization are:
- EWWW Image Optimizer
- WP Smush
- TinyPNG Compress JPG & PNG Images
#3 Slow server response time
This issue is related to your website hosting, rather on your WordPress setup. If using any of the speed detection tool, as mentioned above, you find that your website is facing a slow server responsive time due to which its loading speed has been affected, you must contact your web hosting support.
Here are few things that you must lookout for, while choosing a web hosting company:
- 24/7 support
- High performance servers
- Security arrangements
- CDN for better speed
- Affordable pricing
Recommended post: All You Need To Know About Web Hosting
#4 Unnecessary redirects
It usually happens with websites that have been functional for a while already, that several of their webpages are no more working. It could be due to the deletion of some webpages or changes in the permalinks.
Whichever the reason, it causes the link to redirect while making an attempt to visit the originally created pages.
Since some of those old links may be active on search engine indexes or other external websites & blogs, your website will keep facing issue of redirects as long as the users or crawlers will attempt to establish a connection with your non-working webpages.
#5 Unnecessary CSS & JS
This is something which every website developer must take care of.
Using unnecessary CSS or JS files & scripts can also affect the loading speed of any WordPress website.
Again, when you use WordPress for your website development, you can use several free & paid plugins in order minify those CSS & JS files or codes.
Some of those useful plugins are:
- Autoptimize
- W3 Total Cache
- WP Fastest Cache
- Fast Velocity Minify
- Hummingbird Page Speed Optimization
#6 Outdated WordPress version
Do you check the version of your WordPress CMS regularly? If not, you must start doing it now.
Outdated WordPress version of your website may be another reason why your webpages are loading slowly. Do ensure to update it as and when required.
Regularly updating your WordPress CMS to its latest version will sure that:
- Your website has optimized loading speed.
- Your website has no possible threats of hacking, to a certain extent.