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WordPress site too slow – Causes and Solutions
Visitors nowadays want fast loading websites for a flawless online surfing experience, and the speed matters even more when it comes to online shopping. If your site doesn’t load fast enough, chances are the visitors will be turning away and it may hurt your reputation.
Speed might be one drawback of using open source Content Management System like WordPress as addition of new features is fairly simple which in turn slows down your site. So, if you have built your site using WordPress and you are experiencing flaws in the loading speed, there might be various factors some of which are discussed below with its possible solution.
Theme
Theme is most primary thing that you will require to build and WordPress site so, you also need to consider the performance factor while selecting a theme for yourself. A loosely coded theme can make your site drastically slow whereas a theme with highly optimized code will serve for the best.
So, always use the free themes from the WordPress repository, or use paid themes from a trusted company which will normally cost you under $100.
Plugin
Plugins can be a life savior, when it comes to the addition of new features to your WordPress site. But it can drag your page speed down because loads its own CSS and JS. So, unwanted installations of random plugins can lead to sluggish loading of your site.
How can you determine which plugin is consuming your site’s loading time??
Again, here comes a plugin to the rescue, P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler) measures the plugin’s impact on your site’s load time. So, you can use this plugin and decide which plugin is worth keeping.
High Resolution Images
A high resolution image can be up to 20MB in size which is far more heavy as compared to the text content which are just a few hundred KBs. Similarly if you are using numerous images in your site, then it increases the loading time of your site.
The solution is to optimize the images, for this you can use plugins like EWWW Image Optimizer and WP Smush Image Optimizer.Another solution can be lazy load which means only loading the images when it is visible in the viewport. You can use Lazy load plugin for this purpose.
Hosting
Cheap or free hosting solutions may be good for your wallet but are bound to hurt your page loading speed which is ultimately a bigger loss. So, go out there and choose a decent service provider and a fair hosting plan even if it costs you a little bit more.
Page Caching
Page caching generally means saving up the page HTML in your hard drive so that if the same page is viewed again in the future, then it can be loaded directly from your computer instead of the server which saves you a noticeable amount of loading time.
You can use WP Super Cache or W3 Total Cache plugin to accomplish the page caching.
Done Optimizing???
Now you can use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights , Pingdom Tools Full Page Test to check your page speed.