WordPress Website Speed Issues and How to Fix Them

The speed of the website load is one of the key factors in the modern digital world. The reason why speed becomes so important is the presence of high competition and a lack of patience from a common user. In other words, users would prefer to visit another website rather than waiting for yours to load slowly.

Although the WordPress platform gives tons of opportunities to avoid the speed reduction of your website, it is not always obvious where the problem hides and how to deal with it. That is why we have decided to gather the most common WordPress website speed issues within this article. Moreover, you will get some advice on how to get rid of these pesky problems.

How to Check Your WordPress Website Speed

Actually, the first step to solve the problem is to get knowledge about its reasons. You need a simple but versatile tool to measure your WordPress website speed and to see the main breakpoints of this measurement at the same time.

There are two main options to measure the speed of your WordPress website. One is to use WordPress plugins like Yoast SEO which include speed check as one of the factors to measure the most important search optimization metrics. The second option is to use browser plugins like Lighthouse to get the full report in a few seconds.

Both types of tools will not only measure the speed of your WordPress website but also provide you with precious advice about the features you might want to improve for the sake of your project`s better performance.

Common Speed Issues

Let us observe the most common issues of speed underperformance on the basis of advice given by measuring tools.

Improve the server response time

If your server performance is poor, no other speed enhancement technics would work for your project. That is why it is so crucial to test your WordPress website speed from time to time and acknowledge problems with server response time as soon as possible.

The only way to improve the server response time is to change your hosting provider to a company that guarantees better performance. It would probably cost more than usual hosting plans but it is always worth the investment. If your website loses visitors because of speed underperformance, you lose money that you have saved by using cheap hosting.

Check for unused plugins

WordPress is known for its variety of plugins for any purpose and project type. Some WordPress website owners abuse this feature by downloading and activating too many plugins (most of which they probably do not need).

You need to understand that each additional tool represented by a WordPress plugin requires some resources to run. That is why you should check your plugins directory within the WordPress dashboard and get rid of the tools you do not actually use. You will probably be surprised by the speed improvement after this cleaning action.

Optimize Images

Images represent one of the most viable ways to communicate with your website visitors. However, they also serve as the most common reason for a website speed reduction. Naturally, you would prefer a solution that neither affects the number of images on your website nor reduces their quality. Luckily, such a solution exists.

You will need a special WordPress plugin to optimize the image sizes without losing their quality. A good and free-for-use example of such a tool is EWWW Image Optimizer for WordPress. The most exciting feature of the plugin is that you can implement its settings to optimize images automatically right after you download them to your media library.

Use caching opportunities

Caching is one of the greatest opportunities to speed up your WordPress website. The main point of caching is to save the temporary copy of your website (or some of its most heavy components like images or videos) and use it as a ready template when a user enters your project.

Of course, there are lots of plugins for this purpose. One of the most popular examples is WP Super Cache which is also free for use. Do not hesitate to install and use this plugin or its alternatives to provide your website visitors with a much better user experience.

Keep your website clean and up-to-date

You have probably heard about the importance of WordPress updates for the safety of your website. However, these updates are also decisive for performance issues. Do not forget that internet browsers evolve each day, and WordPress tries to cope with their updates correspondingly. You should not ignore WordPress updates because they affect the load speed and performance of your website directly.

The cleaning procedure is crucial not only regarding unused plugins but also some technical rests of a website utility process. Use simple and effective tools like Garbage Collector to prevent speed reduction because of unutilized of your website’s life circle.

Conclusion

The speed of your website is essential. Do not hesitate to use all the mentioned above tools to provide better performance for your project and the best user experience for your potential customers as a result. Although most of the needed tools are free for use, you can go ahead and buy premium versions of these plugins to skyrocket your website`s speed even further.