WordPress is the most popular content management platform used by businesses all over the world to power their websites. A survey by W3Techs reveals that of all the websites that use a content management system (CMS), WordPress is used by 59.5% of them.
However, a large number of WordPress sites suffer from slow loading time which is a major problem.
Why Is Loading Speed of WordPress Website Important?
Nobody likes to sit and wait for a website that loads slower, especially when they have an alternative to your site. A research by Kissmetrics shows that 47% of the website visitors expect the loading time to be less than two seconds. If a website takes more than three seconds to load, 40% of the visitors will abandon the site.
Another significant finding of the research is that 79% of shoppers who don’t feel satisfied with the speed of a website will less likely to buy anything from the same site again.
It clearly reveals that the visitors care more about the loading time of a site than the design, front-end functionality and content on it. Furthermore, Google considers the page loading time is the main factor when ranking them on a search engine, making it crucial for businesses to work with proficient web development companies to optimize their site’s performance.
Hence, it is very important to know the main factors that affect the speed of a WordPress site, and how to overcome them. It is also important to have secure WordPress hosting that can improve the speed of your site as well.
Main Factors Affecting the Loading Speed of WordPress Sites and Their Solutions
1. Choice of Web Hosting Service
The choice of web hosting plays a key role in the performance of a site. When you go for cheap shared hosting plans for your WordPress site, the resources on the server or hosting provider are shared with other sites as well. If any other website on the shared server gets more traffic, then it will have an impact on your site.
Solution: Before setting up a blog on WordPress, review the web hosting options/companies, and choose the hosting plan that complements your needs. Shared hosting is not the right solution if you have a large database.
The best option is to opt for a managed WordPress hosting service. With managed WordPress hosting, you get optimized server configurations, security configurations, automatic backups and updates, and no other website can affect the WordPress loading speed of your site.
2. Uploading Large Sized Images and Videos
While the content with colorful images/visuals can make the visitors more likely to read content on your website, but the images or videos with large size can significantly reduce the page loading time.
A mistake that most WordPress users make is uploading the images on site directly from phone or camera, which are most of the time of large size.
Solution: Before uploading any images to the WordPress media library, compress/optimize it using some photo editing software or image compressor. This can reduce the size of an image by up to five times, and optimize the loading time of WordPress.
Never upload any video on the site. The videos are heavy files and kill the site performance. Rather than uploading, you should embed the video on site after uploading them to YouTube or any other such site.
3. Reduce Use of Plugins and Widgets
WordPress sites provide a broad range of functionalities and customization options, by using several types of plugins and widgets. However, sometimes the use of plugins and widgets result in impacting the WordPress loading speed.
The website owners are not aware of the fact that the tools that provide more features and attractive looks to the site actually slow down the performance. More the number of plugins and widgets you use on a WordPress site, the more time your site takes to load the required content.
Solution: Go through all the installed plugins on your site and review them. Find the inactive plugins and delete them. The inactive plugins continue to load the code and affect the site. And you should update your WordPress, plugins, and themes on a regular basis as new versions remove the possible bugs, issues, and vulnerability of previous versions.
Also, you sometimes use plugins for tasks which can be done without any plugins. For example, you use a plugin for fetching Adsense ads to web pages, which can be done using some functions.php coding. Try to avoid the use of such plugins as well.
4. Protect Hotlinking
When a website embeds media files from your site instead of uploading those files on their own site, it results in hotlinking. With hotlinking, media files embedded on other sites consume bandwidth of your site and reduces the speed of page loading.
Solution: To protect the hotlinking, you can create a .htaccess file using the following code and upload it to your site. Replace the example.com in code with your domain name.
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)example.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule\.(gif|jpg|jpeg|bmp|zip|rar|mp3|flv|swf|xml|php|png|css|pdf)$ – [F]
5. Minimize Use of 301 Redirects
While 301 redirecting is a workable solution if you have permanently moved a page to new URL or changed the domain name. But the 301 redirects generate additional round trip times (RTT), that needs more time to load initial HTML document. This results in a slow website speed.
Solution: Try to avoid or reduce the use of 301 redirects. Also, analyze the number of redirects your site is currently using, and then remove the unnecessary ones. You can review this WordPress speed optimization guide in order to get detailed information.
6. Install a Caching Plugin
The pages on WordPress sites are dynamic and are built on the fly whenever someone visits your site. When you get more traffic, the dynamic approach can’t load the pages simultaneously as fast as expected.
Solution: Install a caching plugin on your WordPress site. What caching plugins do is make a copy of the web page when it is loaded for the first time, then provide the cached version of that page to all the users. Hence, a caching plugin can boost your site loading speed by up to five times faster.
Final Words
Every single second count when it comes to website loading speed. You have got the top six factors that affect the loading speed of your WordPress site, along with their solutions. What are you waiting for? Log in to your WordPress site and fix the problems.