I think we can all agree that rotary dial days of telephones are a thing of the past. We are a society that has become accustomed to pushing a button and whatever button that feature offers, we want it to happen immediately.
If it’s not fast, we abandon it. If it’s not almost instantaneous…we’re not inclined to wait.
The same is certainly true when it comes to your WordPress blog. Your visitors are not interested in waiting for your content to load. If your WordPress blog loads slowly, your visitors will leave and you will lose traffic.
As a result, it’s more important than ever to actually LOOK at your WordPress blog, Click through the pages. Watch them load and analyze their page load times.
Think about it. As a WordPress blogger, we often focus on adding new plugins, updating our themes, changing our widgets, adding new popups and lead generation forms. But have you really dug in deep to your user experience and considered what your visitors see?
Even more so, are you aware of your blog speed and if it may be causing you to lose traffic and (heaven forbid) conversions and customers?
In this article we’re going to look at the low-down on WordPress site speed, specifically why your blog speed may be slow and steps you can take to speed it up.
Is blog speed really that important when it comes to my WordPress site?
If you aren’t serious about using your web site or blog to drive revenue, then speed probably isn’t that important. If, however, you use your site to sell products, share knowledge, drive affiliate sales, or even generate ad revenue, then you need to seriously think about why your WordPress site might be slow.
Think of your blog speed in terms of being just as important as your business needing customers. You’re probably thinking that’s a little much, but the truth of the matter is the speed of your website often has a big effect on your sales.
The bigger eye opener is the fact that Google and other search engines are now starting to reward fast-loading site, meaning that slow sites are going to be pushed down in the search results. Essentially, slow sites are being penalized albeit not with a traditional Google penalty.
Want to dig deeper into that topic? Pause for a moment and play the video below. It’s a a long video (about 45 minutes) but worth the watch.
Although research shows that most sites take anywhere from 8-11 seconds to load, other research reports that 53% of mobile users will leave a site that takes more than 3 seconds to load. In other words, speed is a critical factor and determines how much traffic you’ll get and how much of that traffic will actually stick around and covert.
But no worries! You’re reading this because you’ve probably determined that your WordPress blog is slow and looking for some reasons why.
6 Reasons Why Your WordPress Blog May Be Slow
When you understand why your site is loading slow, you can begin pinpointing things to help speed it up. Below is an overview of things that can slow down your site.
Slow WordPress hosting
WordPress hosting is supposed to make using the platform much easier, especially with hosting that has been optimized to meet performance and security needs. However, there are times when your WordPress hosting isn’t configured properly, which in return will hurt your website speed.
We have built WordPress sites on a variety of different platforms over the years. We have built on hosts like GoDaddy, HostGator, Wix, and 1&1. Right now, however, our preference is to host with either WP Engine or Siteground.
WPEngine is the most popular hosting company for WordPress bloggers and they (like most other WP hosting companies) offer automatic backups, advanced security configurations, automatic updates, and more. In return, this can decrease the lag speed that using a shared hosting provider often comes with.
As you’ll see in our WordPress plugin testing and WordPress theme testing results, we use Siteground as the host for our sandbox environment. This is because we have traditionally seen very good speed results with Siteground at a very competitive price.
If you determine that your hosting is not up-to-par and could be slowing down your WordPress site, it might be time to make the switch. Any good WordPress host should help you migrate your site over the course of a weekend.
Slow WordPress theme
Depending on your choice of branding you may want to opt for a theme that comes with all the bells and whistles. Themes like Bridge and Avada can come with a lot of features, including page builders and widgets…but those features can also come at a price and slow down your site.
You can find a WordPress theme to fit just about any preference; however, the more elements, widgets, sliders, social icons, etc you have, the more it can slow down your load time. Going with default WordPress themes is one workaround, while another would be to go for a lightweight theme. Both can still give you an amazing looking blog but without the slow speed.
If you want a fast WordPress site and you are on a good host, the last think you want to do is start off with a slow theme.
We often recommend themes built on the Genesis framework because they have a history of being fast and well-supported. Other themes that are highly recommend for speed include Astra and GeneratePress.
Be sure to check out our theme speed tests to find one that might meet your needs.
Too many plugins
While one of the best aspects about WordPress is the availability of thousands of plugins, having too many can actually work against you. Yes, they can help optimize your site and aid in getting it to look exactly how you want it. However, with each plugin you install (and activate) there is a potential to increases your load time.
Some plugins, especially the free ones, can even double your load time. As a result, it’s really important to keep an eye on how many plugins you install and work to keep it to a minimum.
It’s also important to test each plugin and ensure that it isn’t slowing down your site when it’s activated.
In addition to having too many plugins, there are also chances that you could run into some poorly coded ones. This can also significantly slow down your blog. The important takeaway is test, test, test.
JavaScript and CSS that are not optimized and minified
JavaScript is responsible for controlling almost everything from updating content, controlling multimedia, and animating images. On the other hand, CSS comes into play when setting fonts, background colors, and the layout of your content.
While terms like scripting, minification, and style sheets can sound like gibberish to anyone outside the web developer world, it’s important that you understand what they are an how using them improperly can significantly slow your blog down.
We’ll go into these specific topics in future blogs, but if you don’t think your scripts and style sheets are optimized, be prepared to dig in and evaluate them.
Images that are too large and not optimized
It’s a pretty simple formula…large images take longer to load. In the “olden days” of the Web, hackers would target sites with forms that allowed for a document upload and would simply upload an obscenely large image of Earth that was taken from space. Trying to process the large image size would literally take the server down, causing site outages on the server.
Luckily, hosts have put limits in place that stop this type of large-file upload attack from happening, but the example illustrates an ongoing problem with site speed. If you download high-resolution photos directly from your DSLR camera or GoPro and don’t bother to optimize them appropriately, you are going cause speed issues (along with bandwidth consumption issues) for your site.
Fixing this problem sounds plugin easy; however, you’ll want to make sure you don’t sacrifice the quality of your images in the compression process.
Too many external calls to third party services
With the growing list of third party services – think Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, etc. – you’re probably tempted to embed photos, videos, tweets, and the like. The downside to these external calls is the pull on load time.
Simply put, with each tag placed on your website, that’s another request or “call” to that third party server. This will then put your load time in the hands of quickly the outside source responds. The more you have, the more handshakes will have to take place.
The biggest offender we often see are blog posts that have 12-15 GIF images embedded in them from sites like GIPHY. Each of these embeds relies on a third-party call to the GIPHY servers. The slower the GIPHY servers, the slower your site.
One or two embeds can be okay. Beyond that, you are purposefully slowing down the load time of your page or post.
Why it’s important to evaluate your WordPress blog or website for speed
Evaluating your WordPress blog should become part of your annual to-do list. The more content you add and (hopefully) the traffic your website gains, the more you’ll want to make sure it’s operating up to par.
Overall, you don’t want to assume your blog is running fine and that every visitor is happy with their visit.
Also wrapped up in this evaluation is the fact that Google does not show favor to slow websites, which can hinder your ranking, conversions, and the ability to grow your business using the power of the Internet.
How to remedy the issues
Remedying your blog’s slow speed may seem like another mundane task, but the next post in this series will walk you through how to remedy these issues.
We will look at practical, no-nonsense ways to make sure your WordPress blog is running at top performance and working in your favor. Stay tuned for more site speed steps to comes.