What’s causing your WordPress site to slow down?

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When it comes to site speed, the faster the better. Slow load times can be the death of a blog. Fortunately, if your WordPress site has been lagging lately, there are a few likely (and, in most cases, easily solved) problems.

Your pre-made theme wasn’t built to WordPress standards

While the most popular WordPress themes like Genesis Framework are meticulously designed to meet WordPress development standards, not all of them are so well thought out. If your site is running a third-party theme, it’s possible that you’ve got one of the duds. Unfortunately, developers who don’t take the time to ensure their themes will work over the long haul probably don’t offer long haul level support.

Solution

If your theme is the source of your slow load time, you’re probably better off investing in a higher quality theme.

You’re running too many plugins

Plugin bloat is another problem that’s often associated with themes. Most pre-made themes are designed to appeal to the widest range of users, which means they come equipped with a lot of plugins that aren’t necessary for the average blogger. These useless plugins make your website work harder, slowing down load time. Themes can’t take all the blame, though. Sometimes bloggers just get carried away by all the cool plugin functionality.

Solution

The easy fix for this problem is to run through your plugins and determine which ones are actually pulling their weight. Get rid of any plugins that aren’t essential to your blog’s optimal functioning, and you’ll see faster load times immediately.

Your images aren’t optimized

If your site is rich in visuals, it may be poor in speed. High quality, large images, in particular, can take a toll on load time.

Solution

The first step to addressing your image problem is to optimize your images before you upload them to your site. First, make sure your gorgeous photographs are in .jpg format for maximum compression. Then, resize them to the actual size they’ll be on your website. If you leave resizing to WordPress, you’re slowing load time considerably.

Another way to solve your image problem is to implement Lazy Load, which limits image loading to those images in your immediate field of vision.

You’re running on a low-quality hosting site

If you’re running your blog on a free or cheap hosting provider, there’s a solid chance the provider is contributing to your slow load time.

Solution

Invest in a quality WordPress web hosting service like WPopt, Orange Geek, or Flywheel, with a fast hard drive and dedicated resources to ensure that your web speed isn’t compromised by slow hosting.

You’ve missed an update

It can happen to anybody, but it’s more likely to happen to people who aren’t hip on the technical side of their blog. Missing an update can cause plugins to malfunction and your site to slow down or even break.

Solution

Keep an eye on the regular updates to WordPress, your theme, and your plugins. If you’ve got your site on auto-update, you’re still not trouble-free. Occasionally, conflicting updates can create chaos on a WordPress site.

If you’re not confident in your own ability to diagnose your WordPress site’s slow load time, get in touch with the WordPress developers at OnceCoupled. We can help you diagnose and resolve the problems that are keeping your site from functioning optimally.