WordPress slow? How to make it lightning fast!

Every day, website operators come to us with slow WordPress websites to. Because poor loading times are (and will be) detrimental to online business.

Let's take a look at ourselves: I'm interested in a topic and search Google for a solution. I visit the most suitable Google result for me. If no content appears there after 3 seconds, I leave the website and visit an alternative.

It's exactly the same with your slow WordPress website. Poor loading times lead to higher bounce rates, lower visibility in Google and a poorer user experience.

Don't worry, your website can also load much faster with a few tips and tricks. As WordPress hoster we support website owners every day in optimizing their slow WordPress. Use the tips and advice in this article to make your WordPress website load faster too!

Consequences of slow websites

You have probably left a mobile website more than once because it loaded too slowly. This is probably the worst thing that can happen to a website operator. And yet, according to Google Research, the average mobile website takes around 15 seconds to load in 2018.

I will explain why and what the negative consequences of a slow website are below:

Poorer user experience

Part of the user experience is the usability of a website. A website is considered user-friendly if it is easy to use.

So if you have slow loading times, this makes your website less user-friendly. Due to the poor user experience, website visitors will leave your website much faster.

Poorer conversion rate

If the user experience is poor due to slow loading times, the conversion rate also drops. This means that fewer website visitors complete a purchase, register for your newsletter or apply to your company

Example 💡: According to a Study by Deloitte the conversion rate increased by 8.4 % on retail websites and 10.1 % on travel websites with a 0.1 second improvement in mobile page speed.

Poorer rankings in Google

In 2010, Google officially announced that loading time is an official SEO ranking factor. Ten years later, Google added another SEO ranking factor: page experience. This means that the user signals sent on a website are also included in Google's evaluation.

If your WordPress is slow, the positive user signals decrease and the loading time is not in the green zone either. As a result, your website will be ranked lower than with a fast WordPress.

That's what Google says 💡: If your website is faster, this is not only good for users, but ultimately also for search engines. (Source: YouTube, Google Search Central)

Causes for slow WordPress

There are various reasons that can affect the loading times of your website. From poorly optimized images and unreliable hosting to overloaded themes and inefficient plugins - all of these factors can cause your site to respond sluggishly.

I'll break down the most common causes of slow WordPress right away. Then I'll show you how you can use pagespeed tests to identify and fix the causes on your WordPress website yourself.

Note 💡: You will find suggested solutions for the causes further down in the article!

Overloaded web hosting

The hosting of your website determines the resources available to your website. This includes storage space, CPU and RAM.

If your website regularly experiences peaks in CPU and RAM usage, your WordPress will become slow. In the worst case, you may even receive a white screen of death with the error message "Resource limit is reached".

Resource-hungry plugins and themes

One of the biggest advantages of WordPress are the various Plugins and Themesthat extend the functions of WordPress.

Unfortunately, some WordPress plugins and themes are unnecessarily bloated, poorly programmed and insufficiently optimized. This makes them resource-hungry, which leads to performance losses on your WordPress website.

Large images, graphics and videos

A very common cause of slow WordPress websites are images, graphics and videos with a large file size. This can be caused by a high resolution or large dimensions, for example. The page speed of your website will be significantly slower due to the size of the data.

Tip💡: Integrate your videos from external sources. For example, you can upload your video to Vimeo or YouTube and then embed it on your website via iFrame. If you choose to embed via YouTube, adjust your privacy policy and cookie settings accordingly in order to embed the video in compliance with the GDPR.

Many HTTP requests

HTTP requests are always executed when a website is called up. The content of your website, i.e. images, text, HTML, CSS and JavaScript files, is displayed via the HTTP requests.

Tip💡: You can easily check the number of HTTP requests in the DevTools of the Chrome or Edge browsers. Right-click on your website, click "Inspect" and select the "Network" tab in DevTools. Now refresh the page to track the HTTP requests. Tada - here you have an overview of all HTTP requests.

If you have a lot of animations, images or scripts, they will unnecessarily bloat your website. This results in many HTTP requests, which in turn are the cause of slow WordPress.

Javascript and CSS

You can use JavaScript and CSS to make your website more interactive, for example with animations. To be able to execute Javascript and CSS, a script must be loaded. No other content on your website will be loaded until this script is loaded.

Therefore, many scripts have a huge impact on the performance of your website.

Measure website speed

Before you start Optimize the pagespeed of your websiteyou should use the Test the loading time of your website. There are various free and paid tools on the market for this purpose. I will now introduce you to our favorite "GTmetrix" and the Google tool "PageSpeed Insights".

Bonus tip💡: You can use our free speed test perform a detailed load time evaluation of your website and even receive important explanations on top! In addition, you get the chance to 100 % free of charge to discuss with our pagespeed experts 🤩

GTmetrix

The pagespeed analysis tool GTmetrix measures the performance and speed of your website. You then receive detailed reports that describe the performance of your website in detail. GTmetrix uses the guidelines of the two pagespeed analysis tools as the basis for the evaluations Google Pagespeed Insights and YSlow.

You can register with GTmetrix free of charge. You can then test the pagespeed of your website from Canada, China, UK, India, USA, Australia and Brazil free of charge. If you have a paid membership, you can also test directly from Germany.

Note💡: The pagespeed result also depends on the server location and where the test is run from. If your website is hosted on a German server, the test from Canada will be significantly worse than the test from Germany.

By default, the evaluation of the desktop pagespeed of your website is selected. If you decide to use the Pro version of GTmetrixyou can also measure and evaluate the loading time of your mobile website.

The GTmetrix Reports gives you all the important information about the pagespeed of your website. Various metrics, waterfall charts, videos, recommendations and tips are listed. The most important information in the report for your pagespeed optimization is:

• Web Vitals: Largest Contentful Paint, Total Blocking Time, Cumulative Layout Shift
• Performance Metrics: First Contentful Paint, Speed Index, Time to Interactive
• Total Page Size: Total size, divided into the sizes of images, fonts, HTML, CSS and more
• Waterfall Chart: Detailed breakdown of the page load process by showing each individual request
• Speed Visualization: Shows when which content is loaded with screenshots in the timeline

If these terms are foreign to you, that's no problem. GTmetrix gives you an overall grade between A (best grade) and F (worst grade). You can use this grade as a basis for your optimization measures.

Google PageSpeed Insights

The tool from Google "PageSpeed Insights (PSI)" measures the pagespeed of your website completely free of charge. It also evaluates the behavior of your website for the mobile and desktop view. Based on the results, you will receive specific tips to improve your website loading time, accessibility, SEO and user-friendliness.

As with GTmetrix, you enter your URL in the search and start the evaluation. You will then find out whether you have passed the Core Web Vitals test and receive an overall rating for your website. The overall rating can reach up to 100 points and is made up of the ratings for performance, accessibility, best practices and SEO.

Under each of the different areas, you will see recommendations from Google that you can use to improve the overall rating of your website. Frequent recommendations based on the pagespeed test are:

• Provide images in modern formats such as WebP
• Dimension images in the correct (usually smaller) format
• Reduce excessive DOM sizes (many elements, lines and sections on your website)
• Reduce JavaScript execution time

You can choose between mobile and desktop for the rating - and these values can also vary greatly.

An important note for the use of PageSpeed Insights: There are websites that have an average result in PSI despite an enormously fast actual loading time. So don't focus on the load time evaluation, but on the recommendations for optimizing your website. To measure the actual loading time, use GTmetrix.

The optimum charging time

Wondering when your WordPress starts to slow down? There is no one-size-fits-all answer. The expectations of website visitors vary greatly depending on the industry and individual requirements.

If your website is about a tech topic, the expectations are higher than for a blog about ancient history. So also analyze how fast your competitors' websites load and be a little faster 🚀

The Limit of 3 seconds should not be exceeded under any circumstances! According to studies, website visitors expect the website to load completely in a maximum of 2 seconds. Otherwise you will lose the customer: The visitor will leave the page and visit a competitor's website.

This guideline always depends on the loading time of your frontend. If your WordPress backend slow load, this has a negative impact on your work. To make your backend faster, it helps to opt for a hosting plan with more resources. But the following tips will also help your backend performance!

Optimization measures for slow websites

Even if your WordPress is slow, you can use various Pagespeed optimization measures significantly improve the loading time. Our pagespeed experts give you their best tips from over 1,500 pagespeed optimizations. So your WordPress will be fast too!

Note💡: Create a Backup your WordPress website before you start with the optimization measures.

Building your website

The structure of your website is probably one of the most decisive factors as to whether your WordPress is slow or not.

I would like to explain this to you directly using a concrete example: You can build one and the same website, one with 18 columns, 15 containers and 77 elements and the other with 7 columns, 6 containers and 46 elements.

These elements are the basis for the DOM size of your website. Even if both pages look the same, the website with the larger DOM size can have a massive impact on the rendering of the website.

To reduce the structure of your website, and therefore the DOM size, I recommend the following steps:

• Optimize the number of columns, containers and elements used. If you can't do this during the layout phase, do it afterwards. This is usually easier.
• Avoid WordPress plugins with functions that you may already be able to solve with board tools. More on this further down in the article!
• Use as few (external) scripts as possible.

Challenge Tip💡: Try to recreate your website 1:1 on a staging website. The aim here should be to drastically reduce the DOM size on the staging.

Optimize images

One of the most common reasons for slow WordPress: Large data from images, graphics and gifs. The larger your image, the longer it takes to load.

Did you already know💡: When you upload an image to your WordPress media library, three additional image formats are automatically created by WordPress. Depending on the theme, there may even be significantly more!

There are various WordPress plugins for optimizing your images. Here you can already optimize most of your images in the free version. When optimizing, make sure that the images only lose size and not quality.

For example, you can use these WordPress plugins for image optimization:

• EWWW Image Optimizer: The plugin is one of the most popular image optimization plugins with over 1 million active installations (as of 08/2024). Your images can be automatically adjusted to the appropriate size, reduced in size or even displayed in WebP.
• Short Pixel Optimizer: With Shortpixel you can significantly reduce the size of your images. Save over this link* 100 credits free of charge.
• Imagify: Offers you various options for optimization and compression. Among other things, you can display images in WebP or automatically scale images during upload.

You can also reduce the size of the images before uploading them. For example, you can use tools such as Adobe Photoshop, Gimp or TinyPNG use

Choose plugins consciously

You can add practical functions to your WordPress with plugins. But do you actually need all these functions?

Each additional plugin requires additional resources. There are plugins that take up more and less resources. This depends on how bloated the plugins are. For you, this means that the more plugins you have installed, the slower your WordPress will be.

That's why you should use as few plugins as possible. Maybe you can even save on plugins? Take a critical look at the plugins you have installed. You can ask yourself the following questions:

• Do I still use this plugin?
• Does this plugin provide unnecessary functions and can it be replaced by a smaller plugin?
• Can the function of the plugin be replaced by a standard WordPress function?

If you no longer need plugins, I recommend deactivating the plugin for two weeks to test it. During this time, you can test whether the functionality of your website is still guaranteed. At the end of the grace period, you can delete the plugin.

Cleaning out your plugins is a simple way to make your WordPress frontend and backend faster. This is a process that you can repeat regularly.

Clean up database

Data has been collected in your database since the start of your website. This is because your database is responsible for managing, storing and providing content, user data, information and other data for your WordPress instance. As more and more data is stored in the database every day, it takes up more and more storage space and makes your WordPress slow.

Maintaining and cleaning your database should be an integral part of your regular Website care be.

You can clean up your database manually. However, I recommend using a plugin for this. Simply search for "Database" in the plugin library and select one of the results for you.

Update PHP version

PHP ensures that your website is not boring and static, but dynamic. With a new and more performant PHP version, you can close potential security gaps and improve the speed of your website.

With WPspace, you can conveniently change the Customize PHP version with two clicks. However, this can vary greatly depending on the hoster and can be significantly more complex.

Note💡: With new PHP versions, there may be incompatibilities between the new PHP version and plugins. It is therefore essential to check the functionality of your website after adapting the PHP version.

Caching

Caching is by far the biggest performance lever for the front-end load time of your website. There are different types of caching: server-side caching and caching using a WordPress plugin.

By default (without caching), WordPress executes a database query each time it is called up in order to dynamically generate the page content for the visitor. Each call therefore costs valuable computing power of your hosting (CPU, RAM, PHP worker).

If you use a caching plugin, you store the static content of your website temporarily. When a visitor accesses your website, this content is then loaded from the cache instead of from the database. This eliminates unnecessary database queries and ensures top loading times in front-end performance.

Note💡: There is content that cannot be cached. This dynamic content is created when using WooCommerce or BuddyPress, for example.

WordPress hosting

The right hosting for your website is a real lever for improving the performance of your website.

With inexpensive bulk hosts, you often get shared hosting. This means that your website shares the available resources with other (unknown to you) websites on a server. This can lead to your website not having enough resources available, making it slow or even unavailable.

We therefore recommend that you Managed WordPress host which provides you with dedicated resources. This means that your website can use the booked resources 24/7.

In addition to performance, a managed WordPress host supports you! It ensures greater security, backups, updates and reliability. A support team is also available to help you with any questions you may have about WordPress.

Free speed comparison (bonus tip)💙🚀: At WPspace you can create a free demo move book. This includes a free pagespeed optimization. Afterwards, you will receive a speed comparison of your website in the form of a before and after report as well as further individual optimization tips for your website.

Conclusion: Slow WordPress can be optimized

You can determine whether your WordPress is slow with a speed test. These speed tests use metrics to show you how well your website loads overall. This is a great orientation value for you - but also check the loading times of your competitors to determine your optimal loading time.

Even if the result is poor, the loading time of your website has a lot of potential. With various measures, you can optimize a slow WordPress to top loading times in the frontend and backend. Various measures are necessary for this:

• Reduce the DOM size of the website
• Optimize images
• Sort out plugins
• Clean database
• Update PHP version
• Configure caching
• Rely on high-performance hosting

WPspace also offers free pagespeed optimization. This allows you to test how fast your website can really be. Simply arrange a Date for the demo move and be pleasantly surprised by the results of your loading time.

Do you have further questions about your slow WordPress? Then feel free to contact our support team or leave us a comment with your question 🚀