I know, I know. You’re saying to yourself “My WordPress website is not slow.” And you would be right! If your blog loads in under a second and it’s loading fast for everyone else too, then congratulations! Your site is running smoothly. But if your site starts to lag seconds after loading or if other people can’t seem to load it at all, then you might have an issue with speed.
Here are five reasons why your WordPress website could be slowing down and what you can do about them:
1) Too Many Plugins
Plugins are great because they give us the opportunity to use features that we couldn’t otherwise get without programming knowledge but sometimes these add unnecessary code which slows down our sites. If you find that your site is slow and you have a lot of plug-ins installed, try disabling some of the less important ones just to see if it helps at all. If not, try reevaluating which plugins you really need and only install one where its functions are necessary.
It’s better to start with a small selection of quality plugins than a large selection of lightweight ones. You can’t judge a plugin’s effectiveness by how light it is. Apart from this, make sure to keep your plugins up to date as well.
2) Poorly Coded Theme
This is a bit of a given but some WordPress themes can have badly written code which will slow downloading time. The best way to check for this is to load the site up on Pingdom Tools. In the waterfall, you can see how long each section takes in loading and if there is one particular area where time is being spent. Themes like the Genesis Framework are coded to load as fast as possible so if you have a poorly coded theme, try switching to one like that.
3) Not Optimized for Mobile Devices
Many websites are not optimized for mobile devices and this makes them take longer to download on these devices. If your website design isn’t responsive, then there’s no point in having it mobile optimized because the layout will still be off. A responsive design will reformat the website for all devices, making it easier and faster to load on a desktop computer or smartphone.
If you want to make your current website mobile responsive, you can work with a website design company in India to create a responsive WordPress website.
4) Inefficient Hosting
Hosting is crucial for your website to be able to handle the traffic you want it to, but if your hosting isn’t efficient then you’ll end up with a slow WordPress site. Check out reviews of different hosts on Google and pick one that has good customer service. Look at how many requests per second they can process and make sure it’s enough for your needs and will always be enough.
Ask your hosting provider what their current status is and whether there are any scheduled or unplanned downtimes.
5) A Content Delivery Network (CDN)
A CDN can be used to help load your site faster because it will store cached versions of each image, page, asset, etc on a server that serves the data directly from the node instead of your origin server. This is especially helpful if your site is getting a lot of traffic since the CDN will be able to handle the load and serve content faster than a site without one. By using a CDN, you can fix many of the problems mentioned above.
However, there are some downsides to using it. The first is that it adds a monthly cost to your hosting, especially if you have a lot of traffic. Next is that a CDN can reduce the site’s search engine optimization (SEO) and negatively affect its ranking because the content is being loaded from a different server without giving credit to Google for crawling the website beforehand.
It all comes down to whether your current hosting is good enough, whether you need the additional speed boost a CDN will provide, whether it makes sense for your site to have one and whether you’re willing to pay the extra cost.
Work with a Web Design Company
You know you need to improve your page speed but you may not know how. It’s important that the changes are well-informed so let a web design company in India help you optimize your site to ensure it has the best performance possible.
A reputed web design agency can help you identify the plugins which don’t function well and replace them with filtered versions that do what they’re supposed to. They can also help you choose a good CDN provider, reduce downloading time by increasing the number of files being served at once (HTTP Keep-Alive) and reducing the number of requests. If your site has a poorly coded theme, they can help you switch to a better one which will mean faster loading times.