There can be many reasons why WordPress is slow. Here are some of the most common ones. The article is primarily aimed at users of WordPress, but many of the principles also apply to other platforms.
Slow hosting
Many web hosts have a business model that is based on pushing a large amount of customers into the same server. As a result, they can keep a fairly low price, but performance usually suffers because each customer has very limited resources at their disposal. This can be especially noticeable in database queries that WordPress does on every page load (unless the page is cached). The problem can get even worse for your website if other customers who are on the same server have a lot of traffic to their site.
Solution
Change hosting. Liberdev can host your website on fast servers in Europe.
Bloated themes
One advantage of WordPress is that there are many themes to choose from, but unfortunately, many themes are not developed with performance in mind. Something that often lowers performance is that you have added huge amounts of Javascript, which means that more data has to be downloaded and that it becomes heavier for the browser to run the page.
Solution
Switch to a theme that is developed with performance in mind. We can help you migrate to a faster theme. We can also develop a custom theme adapted to your needs and with great performance.
Pagebuilders
Pagebuilders can be handy if you want to be able to change the look of a page without having to code. A major disadvantage of pagebuilders is that they often send a lot of queries to the database because the page layout is saved there. The problem can be circumvented to some extent by using caching, but it only works for static pages. Many pagebuilders also put in an extreme amount of Javascript. It is often outdated libraries, such as Jquery, that degrade performance and lower the rating in search engine rankings.
Solution
Consider deprecating the pagebuilder and switching to using Generateblocks or a custom solution with Advanced Custom Fields. Liberdev can help you
Plugins
A major advantage of WordPress is that there are a plethora of plugins to choose from to customize your website according to your needs. Unfortunately, with the plugins as with themes, many are not designed with performance in mind. Some plugins can pull in a lot of cumbersome Javascript or create huge amounts of tables and rows in the database.
Solution
Choose better plugins and clean the database of unused data. Some plugins can also be replaced with specially developed plugins from Liberdev.
Images which are not optimized for the web
It’s easy to forget that every image uploaded to a website will also be downloaded. Visitors may not have as fast a connection as you do, so it may take much longer for them to download an image than it takes for you. The images you use on a website should be scaled or compressed and in a suitable file format.
Solution
Upload optimized images or use a plugin that optimizes the images. Liberdev can automatically convert your images to Webp, a file format adapted for the web.
Would you like help with making your WordPress faster?
If you would like some help optimizing your WordPress for speed, contact us and we will begin with a survey to detect bottlenecks impacting the performance.