People ask on forums all the time why their WordPress website is slow. Quite often people don’t realize it could be any number of factors from:
- The hosting service you’re using
- The computer you are on
- The quality of code of the theme
- Plugins that are not quality
- Or, even something simple as rebooting your computer.
Security Issues
A lot of people are learning recently due to outages and attacks that have happened online causing sites hosted at shared service providers to be shut down or run slow.
It’s once again prompting people to question where to get their site hosted for a good price but yet keep it fast and up and running.
Shared hosting may be the best solution for your businesses cost effectiveness. However, for a business this is something you want to not be to cost-effective with.
I realize your on a budget. But ask yourself how much revenue you potentially are losing because you’re site is slow. Slow sites Google does not like and people don’t like. I go to a website looking for information. I just need to sometimes pop in and pop out. If I cannot get in quickly and out quickly because your site is slow you’re losing potential revenue and potential customers.
Don’t play around shared hosting with your business. I understand you want to save money and you don’t think it should be that expensive but quite frankly, you get what you pay for. Hosting is an important part of your websites existence, health and performance. If your websites hosting service is poor then customers will perceive that your services is poor because it will be effective in slow load times.
Why Your WordPress Website May Be Slow
Speed Testing Tools
If hosting isn’t the issue or your local internet connection or machine you are on, then start with the site. One way to start checking if it’s your site or you is Pingdom.com
Pingdom.com is a site review service that will tell you if your WordPress theme is querying the database excessively, the total load time of the site, and detail out causes for that latency. It’ll also let you test your DNS health. Read more here about a DNS.
Plugins
Turn off plugins and retest at Pingdom. You can also get a app for your browser called YSlow. There is a app for Google Chrome users and Firefox.
Images
If you are uploading images and not optimizing them, then that could be the issue. High resolutions images are great and provide clear imagery, but not all servers can handle it, especially shared hosting. So open up photoshop or a tool of your choice like Smushit.com (seriously that’s what it’s called) and compress and make them web friendly.
Conclusion
If you need further assistance in figuring out what is causing slowness (latency) issues on your site, feel free to contact Element 502 and we’ll take a look.
