A moderate WordPress website is noxious for business! You may have fantabulous content, an astounding product, and classic design but if site goofs off to load, your connoisseur will bail on you.
We subsist in the era of earnest recompense. We don’t prefer waiting for anything. We don’t prefer staying in line at the counter, stop lights, restaurants and the same applies to websites!
In different circumstances, a swift loading website can engage connoisseur and keep them surfing through your pages. Google also contemplates page speed as a ranking factor while yielding results for the desktop user and, as of July 2018, mobile users as well. You can dip into more about Google’s latest “Speed Update” in this post on the Official Google Webmaster blog.
Fabricating an optimized WordPress site is not a child’s play. Many distinct parts of the project need to come together.
That’s why fixing a slow website is not always a piece of cake.
Without furthermore introduction, we have contoured our trouble shooting tips into three fragments:
Hosting Allied Consequences
- Slow Server
- Server Location
- PHP Version
- CDN
Website Allied Consequences
- Malware Infection
- Obsolete Software
- Heavy Theme
- Too Many Plugins
- Conflicting Plugins
- Theme and Plugin Bugs
- Database Optimization
- Caching
- Minification & Concatenation
- External HTTP Request
- Defer Parsing of JavaScript
Content Allied Consequences
- Lazy Load Content
- Optimize Images
- Hotlinking
Now, some of the listed points may not apply to your website. Merely, stick around and work through the list crossing off points as you proceed through the guide.
As an addendum, we wrote a brief and resembling article about fixing slow WooCommerce sites and if you don’t have time for sifting your website, we also proffer a paid speed optimization
Speed Test
The first step when debugging a deliberate website is to run a speed test. Here are some of the most expedient websites:
1. ByteCheck
ByteCheck is a simple tool that measures the Time to First Byte (TTFB)
TTFB measures the duration from the user’s browser making an HTTP Request to the first byte being retuned from the server.
TTFB is a beneficial denoter when computing if your site is hosted on a moderate server. Preferably, the first approachable should be returned in round about 500ms.
2. Pingdom
Pingdom is one of the most prevailing speed testing tools and our Preferred. The software caters significant accomplishment metrics and a waterfall analysis of your website.
The waterfall Analysis is a chronological list (ordered by load order) of your website’s assets. It’s a miraculous overview that can assist you to distinguish any assets that may taper off your site.
3. GTmetrix
Another cool service is GTmetrix. In addition to performance metrics and waterfall analysis, GTmetrix Presents a list of approbations to improve your site’s page speed.
4. PageSpeed Insights
PageSpeed Insights is a benefit proffered by Google but, in our conception, it’s deceiving and inadequate in information. WP Rocket wrote a great article debunking the Google PageSpeed service.
Hosting Allied Consequences
1. Moderate Server
Even if your website is perfectly optimized- a deliberate server will, naturally, slow your site down.
The swiftest way to ascertain if your website is hosted on a sleepy server is to evaluate the Time to First Byte (TTFB).
If your server takes forever to correspond, you may want to proactively seek for substitute hosting Provider.
2. Server Location
If your chief crowd belongs to Australia, but your website is introduced in the United States, then your website is introduced on the wrong side of the planet! Just determine the distance that needs to be covered to get a reply from the server!
Try to book a hosting account that operates as close as feasible to your crowd.
3. PHP Version
As outlined in the official documentation, WordPress recommends hosting providers to run:
.PHP version 7.2 or greater
.MySQL version 5.6 or greater
Legacy version of PHP may leads to collision with some of your Plugins and may exhibit your site to security vulnerabilities.
To upgrade your PHP Version, login into your cPanel account and look for the PHP Version Manager icon.
4. CDN
CDN stands for Content Delivery Network
A CDN is a network of Servers that are strategically positioned across the globe with aim of stimulating the delivery of your passive web content such as your images, CSS and JS files.
We commend the services of content delivery networks to webmaster that operate with an international audience. At Helpree.com, since our connoisseur come across the globe, we use keyCDN.com. Here is a brief article about integrating keyCDN with the Popular WP Rocket caching Plugin.
Website Allied Consequences
5. Malware Infection
When a WordPress installation gets hacked, the website really starts acting moderately and buggy.
Common manifestations that a site may be hacked include:
• Deliberate to load
• Unable to access the WordPress admin dashboard
• Queer error notification
• Spammy redirects
• Spammy ads
• JS Coin miner anti-virus warning
• High Server Usage
If you spot any of the above symptoms on your website, install one of the following malware scanner Plugins.
If your website is hacked, don’t affright, just work your way through this guide on removing malware from WordPress.
6. Outdated Software
For your WordPress website to work appropriately, you need to regularly upgrade your themes, plugins and the WordPress core. If you haven’t upgraded your website in a while, there is a contingency that you are running outdated software that is deliberating your website.
Sometimes, all it takes to fix a slow website is pressing the update button!
7. Heavy Theme
Most prevalent themes are well coded and thoroughly examined.
However, some themes can make enormous use of JavaScript third plugins. Nothing Unusual, which means that your browser needs to work harder to reimburse your website.
Nobody wants to change the theme, but if you are stuck with a moderate one, you may want to ruminate updating to a lightweight theme. Check out Studiopress.com. They are well known to develop some of the most trustworthy and fastest themes on the net!
8. Too Many Plugins
Let’s take the illustration of the personal computer. When you install a number of games and software on your machine doesn’t it start to slow down?
The same notion applies to your WordPress website. The more active plugins you have on your website, the more refining power is needed to render your website. As a general Criterion, the fewer plugins-the better off you are.
Another way to debugging your plugins is to locate the plugin that’s hauling your load time.
One approach to go about that is to install P3 Plugin Profiler.
P3 Plugin Profiler creates a profile of your WordPress site’s plugins’ deed by valuing their impact on your site’s load time.
9. Conflicting Plugins
Based on our practical acquaintance with troubleshooting websites, we sometimes see clients with two to three plugins installed that do exactly the same thing.
Most common is to see conflicting speed optimization (caching) plugins.
So if you more than one caching plugin installed on your site, de-activate one or the other.
10. Theme and Plugin Bugs
If you find yourself running into a 500 internal server error, there is a risk that either your theme or one of your plugins has a bug!
Thankfully, Debugging in WordPress is Undeviating.
FTP into your installation’s root directory and locate the wpconfig.php file.
Download the file and locate the following line:
And replace it with:
This will empower WordPress’s built-in debugging feature!
Then open the “wp-content” folder and you will spot a new file called “debug.log”. The log will enlist all your installation’s PHP errors. From there you can assess which plugin or theme needs to deleted or replaced.
11. Optimize Database
With the passage of time, your database will probably start filling with content that you need not to have. To amend your website Performance, you can optimize your database by vanishing non-requisite entries.
A Super handy plugin to achieve this is WP-Sweep. By installing the plugin, you can clean up your database by deleting things like post revisions, post-draft, spammed comments, and unapproved comments. It will also optimize
Your database’s structure with just a click.
12. Caching
The most significant step in optimizing a WordPress website is to enable caching.
Caching is a bit trickish to explicate and absolutely worthy of its own blog post! But, here is a brief technical summary taken from WP Rocket.
“ When a connoisseur reviews your WordPress site, their browser talks to your web server which loads up WordPress- this implies PHP processing, making a request to your database, sending files back to the browser to finally be assembled into a fully formed webpage. This can take several seconds- an eternity to modern web surfers.
Caching reinstate that process by sending a static HTML file to the browser instead, which is much faster?
There are enormous caching plugins available for WordPress, but we commend W3 Total Cache and WP Rocket.
W3 Total Cache is one of the most renowned WordPress plugins in the WordPress repository. For its convenience, the plugin supports a ton of characteristics inclusively CDN support and GZIP compression. However, there is so many features and settings that installing the plugin is a little frightening for most users
Alternatively, one can install WP Rocket. WP rocket is premium plugin starting at $39 per license. It encourages all the features of W3 Total Cache Packed in elegant and easy to understand user interface.
13. Minification & Concatenation
A Novel WordPress website contains a number of CSS and JS Files. In some cases, there are so many files that moderate the website. To cut back on HTTP requests and reduce the file size of your static assets, you can minify and concatenate your files.
Minification removes undesirable spaces and characters from JS and CSS files
Concatenation amalgamates several CSS or JS files into one file.
If you have WP Rocket or W3 Total cache installed, both characteristics are supported.
14. External HTTP Requests
Many Websites load all kinds of stuff from other websites. Common external files include:
• Google Analytics
• Google Fonts
• Google Maps
• Facebook’s pixel
• FontAwesome
This is not necessarily a bad thing.
Most of the services are well optimized and will load faster on their servers then yours. However, review your waterfall analysis from your speed test and see if an external request is slowing down your website.
15. Defer Parsing of JavaScript
Before the browser can display your website, it has to render its HTML.
During the process of rendering the HTML, at whatever time your browser Confront a JavaScript file it has to stop, beseech the file, download it and accomplish it before it can persist parsing the remnant of the HTML.
Utmost WordPress themes and plugins load multiple JavaScript files which can detain the rendering time of the page. As a Countermeasure, it is commended to Postpone or defer, the loading of Needless JavaScript files to the footer of the website. It’s a trickish task! More than often, deferring scripts will shatter something on your website, so ensue with Vigilance!
Content Allied Consequences
16. Lazy load Content
Inert loading can meliorate substantial and discerned loading time as images, iframes, and videos will be loaded only as they enter (or about to enter) the viewport.
This is a life saver for lengthy posts with plenty of images. Observe as you scroll down these images fade in? Well, that’s inert loading in the process!
Inert loading is a built-in feature in WP Rocket.
17. Optimize Images
An Image is equivalent to a thousand words!
Images are eminent mode to occupy your audience. But if they are not correctly optimized, they could be hampering your website’s performance. Formerly, you upload images from your mobile or camera; they should be saved in the correct format.
If you avail Adobe Photoshop, the feature is known as “Save for Web”
Furthermore, online services like (they also have a WordPress
Plugin) that uses smart lossy compression techniques to cut down the file size of your images. The effect is nearly imperceptible but it makes a humongous difference in file size!
Galleries and Sliders
While we are on the topic of images, another general cause of an underperforming website is the use of a poorly coded/outdated gallery and slider plugins.
Shout out Envira Gallery and Soliloquy WP for creating two of
the fastest gallery and slider plugins.
18. Hotlinking
Hotlinking, on the web, is bandwidth theft!
It appears when other websites use your images without uploading them to their servers. As a result, you may see a spike in bandwidth without seeing an expansion in traffic. We seldom see this among small and medium-sized business websites, but it’s growing prevalent among popular content websites. One way to Intercept hotlinking is to add the following syntax to your.htaccess file.
Reinstate Helpree.com with your domain.
Over to you – Fix your Slow Websites! Here, you come across 18 real-life tips to enhance your website’s performance. Work your way through the guide and try out a few of the techniques. Just remember to run a speed test before and after optimizing your website. If you found this article Insightful, please share it with your peers and your views below.