Why WordPress Websites are Slow

Why is the speed of WordPress websites slow? This is the claim of most website developers. They always claim that WordPress websites are slower than dedicated coded websites. Given that about 40% of the websites in the world are using WordPress, is this claim valid? In this article, I will explain why WordPress websites are slow and how to increase the speed of these websites.

Why WordPress Speed is Slow

First, we need to explain WordPress to you briefly. WordPress is a content management system (cms) with which we can create a variety of different sites, including store sites, corporate, news, educational; free and in less than an hour. WordPress is one of the most popular content management systems due to its many advantages.

The slow pace of WordPress sites depends on several reasons. The coding of that site can be inappropriate, the server may have a problem, the files on your site may not be optimized, and all of these directly impact the speed of your website. But the speed of WordPress sites, due to their WordPress nature, can be increased with different plugins, choosing a suitable WordPress host. Fortunately, WordPress has very clean coding, and if you have a professional WordPress template, you can be sure that the problem is not with the WordPress template and coding.

To buy a WordPress template, I suggest getting the most popular templates. These templates have minor problems due to high sales and fixing template errors for many different customers. For example, we have been able to have many updates in the Ahura WordPress template with more than thousands of installations, which over time has turned this template into a professional, multi-purpose template. When you use this template, you notice that it does not have a bug. Its presence has a significant impact on the speed of your WordPress website.

Why website speed is important

Site speed has a very high impact on SEO. As you know, SEO is a set of processes that optimizes search engines and makes the website that is better in all respects to rank higher in the Google SERPs.

One of the most important SEO factors is the speed of the website. A website should generally load in less than two to three seconds. Otherwise, it will increase the bounce rate. Bounce rate refers to the percentage of users who entered your website page but left quickly. This means that your website is not helpful to the user and has not led the user to the desired result.

The higher the website bounce rate, the more negatively it will affect the SEO. The site bounce rate reduces page views by the user, reduces user satisfaction, and reduces the conversion rate of visitors to customers. Therefore, increasing the website’s speed is a great help to SEO and website sales.

The benefits of high speed WordPress websites

1. High website speed increases the incoming traffic to your website.
2. Site speed will satisfy your visitors and users.
3. High site speed has a very positive effect on SEO.
4. The high speed of the website makes the search engines give your website a positive rating.
5. Ultimately, the high speed of the website will lead to more sales of your products and services.

Reasons to slow down WordPress sites

As we said before, one of the most critical factors for a good website is the loading speed. Unfortunately, the most common objection to WordPress is that the speed of WordPress sites is low, but we must note that not every system has a high speed by default and is not optimal.

WordPress is no exception. To optimize the speed of WordPress sites, we need to optimize them with speed optimization plugins and follow some tips. In the continuation of this article, we will introduce some tips for optimizing the speed of the WordPress website. But before that, we will explain the reasons that slow down WordPress websites.

WordPress Templates

One factor that slows down WordPress websites is using non-standard templates for designing WordPress websites. These templates are coded in a way that significantly impacts the site’s loading speed. So when using WordPress templates, in addition to paying attention to their appearance and features, we must also pay attention to its standard. For this reason, it is better not to use free templates. Another thing to keep in mind about WordPress website templates is to use templates that do not use a lot of motion or animation.

Some WordPress templates hurt the site’s speed due to their non-standard nature, so choosing light and suitable template for your website is better. Default and ready-made templates need to be optimized and updated; otherwise, they may increase the loading speed of your site. Observing this point is very important for maximizing the speed of the website.

Remove additional plugins

WordPress plugins add many features to WordPress sites and are usually one of the benefits of WordPress. However, installing various plugins on the site will slow down the site. Also, in some cases, the performance of some plugins affects another plugin, which causes several problems in the operation of the website. Therefore, we do not need to install every plugin on WordPress, but according to the site’s needs, we should install only the required plugins on WordPress.

Another way to speed up WordPress sites is to remove non-functional plugins because having these plugins on the site only takes up extra space and slows down the site. So all you have to do is install the required and valuable plugins on your website. After removing non-functional plugins on your website, be sure to empty your host cache so that your host does not take up space due to the cache of deleted files.

Impact of proper hosting on speed

Choosing a host or website hosting significantly impacts the site’s speed. Buying shared hosting at a low price is a very wrong choice. So do not buy free, shared, and cheap hosting. It is better to use dedicated hosting only for your website to get the best results to have a high-speed site. It is also better to use hosts inside your country.

Another problem that slows down WordPress sites is purchasing an unsuitable host. Improper hosting has low hardware power lack of resources. Also; Such hosts are cheaper than other hosts. So having a good host can significantly impact the speed of your website. I recommend hosts known as WordPress dedicated hosts or hosts with fewer sites loaded.

Website server location

The server you choose must be in a good location. The closer the site user is to the server location, the faster the site will load. For example, it is better to use hosts inside your country when providing its customers’ services.

Lack of optimization of images and files

Another reason for slowing down WordPress sites is site images. As you know, a large part of the site content consists of pictures and photos. These images take up a lot of space, and this occupied volume slows down the website. So it is better to optimize the images before uploading them to the website. This will help a lot in speeding up WordPress websites.

Images are the central part of the site content and have a significant impact on the site’s loading speed. High-volume images take up a lot of space and slow down your website loading. Therefore, use small but high-quality images. There are many sites to reduce the size of images, such as Compressor.io and Image Optimizer.

Send many requests

A request is sent to the server on a site page to show each part of the page. The busier your page is and the more sections it has, the more requests you send to the server and the slower the site. Therefore, the more private your site pages are and the fewer ads, the faster that page will load.

Use a CDN

Content Delivery Network is a network consisting of several servers and loads your site from the nearest server depending on the user’s location. In fact, by using this service, you can significantly increase the speed of your site, which will improve your site’s SEO in Google. To find out more about CDN, I suggest you read What a CDN article is.

Mobile version development for website

Today, most Internet users visit websites via mobile. So to satisfy users, it is better to develop a mobile version for the website. This will make your website attract more traffic. So make sure your site is responsive. Doing so will also help speed up WordPress sites.

Enable Browser Caching

When a user visits your site, text, video, and images are stored on the hard disk. In this case, when the user visits the site, this content needs to be uploaded and downloaded for the first time. Still, when you activate the browser cache when the user wants to revisit this content, it does not need to be reloaded, which increases the site’s speed.

Various plugins to activate the cache. Such as w3 total cache and light-speed cache, which you can use for free.

Use the LiteSpeed ​​Cache plugin

LiteSpeed ​​Cache is one of the most popular WordPress cache plugins. Using this plugin reduces page load time. This plugin is a free plugin for WordPress that helps improve the speed of WordPress sites.

To know more about LiteSpeed, this article plugin is recommended for speeding up the WordPress LiteSpeed ​​Cache plugin.

Conclusion

Website speed has a significant impact on the success of your website, and its effectiveness can not be ignored. One of the most important things in SEO is the website’s speed. In fact, since no system has high speed by default. The speed of WordPress sites is also not optimal. To optimize it, we have to use several tasks such as using valid and standard templates, removing additional plugins, optimizing images, using CDN, and using plugins to improve the speed of WordPress sites such as Light Speed ​​Cache. Tips We talked.

Be triumphant and victorious.

Ertano Editorial Staff

At the Ertano content production team, we strive to create the best educational articles on WordPress and online businesses. The accuracy of this page’s content will be reviewed by Reza Rad.