Let’s look at the question, why does a perfectly tuned system sometimes fail? Everything is under the control, everything under the scrutiny of the hosting services, figured out, forgot nothing, but opening the site it’s loaded longer than should be.
In 2015 was conducted research, the results showed that over the past few years, people have stopped focusing on anything for longer than 7 seconds. Although the previous figure was 12 seconds. Could we not to pay attention to the delay in page loading in some 2 seconds? Studies show that even a delay of 1 second leads low the conversions, low the page views, and low customer satisfaction.
How do you think the best is the enemy of the good? Let’s try to remove the reasons that could make your site slow response time, one by one.
A large number of activated plugins
Check the number of activated plugins on your site, it should not exceed 7-10 pcs. Only activated. Every time you start using the site, WordPress starts to download and collect the information you specify. Only activated plugins are loaded at this time. The remaining inactive plugins are completely ignored. The WordPress doesn’t check their names and doesn’t take into account their number, so even if you have hundreds of inactive plugins disabled, it’s doesn’t affect anything. The site performance remains exactly the same as if you didn’t install them at all. Active plugins always slow down the site, control their number.
Large image size
The images bring color to our lives and increase interest. Researchers have found that using color images increases the likelihood of reading your content by 80%. The most common why the site has speed problems is not optimized images. Images in the original may have large file sizes. But choosing the right ratio of the image file format and it’s compression in the editing software you can reduce the image size up to 5 times. The most commonly used image formats are JPEG and PNG, where PNG is the uncompressed image format, JPEG- compressed.
Old versions of WordPress
The not updated version of WordPress not only slows down the loading speed of pages on your site but also exposes vulnerabilities to security risks. When receiving an updated version of the WordPress in addition to speed you get solutions in the form of fixed problems and errors, get updated themes, updated plugins. All for your convenience. Do not neglect this. BestWebSoft has a plugin called Updater that automatically checks and updates WordPress core, plugins and themes.
Slow server response time
Another reason why WordPress is slow is your web hosting. Hosting can save the speed that they provide you. Аs a result we have a very slow response time of the WordPress server to your website. There is the most common type of hosting it calls shared hosting. It hosts several websites including and yours. This means that during peak loads your site competes with everyone else on the server to reach your visitors as quickly as possible.
Not using a content delivery network (CDN)
What is a CDN? CDN is a Content Delivery Network- a group of servers located in different places to provide web content in a wide geographic region. Typically, the entered requests are processed by any nearest network server to the user’s computer. The country where the network server is located can affect the page loading speed of two different users in two different parts of the world. For example, a user from the United States of America will load a page faster than a user, say from Italy, because as the closer you are to the source, as faster your request can be satisfied. Because of the exchange of data and the distribution of several network requests the SDN network makes it easy to load data faster.
Upload audio/video files directly to WordPress
Let’s not forget:
- audio and video hosting reduces the bandwidth of your site;
- there is a chance of withdrawing an additional payment for bandwidth, even if your plan provides unlimited bandwidth (there were cases even of completely closing the site);
- placing large media files increases the size of the backup and makes it difficult to restore WordPress from the backup.
Hosting services such as YouTube, Vimeo, DailyMotion, SoundCloud. They do hard work. They have bandwidth for this.
The colorful and impressive theme
Badly written theme codes can slow down your site. They ignore the standard WordPress practices and making too many unnecessary database queries. This can really slow down your server. Choosing a theme that is replete with complicated maquettes, colorful animations, and other unnecessary functions, remember what it may cost you. High-quality WordPress plugins allow you to complement any theme with any colors and allow to express all your wishes.
Slow plugins
From the first paragraph of this article, we remember that it takes time to download any installed WordPress plugin on your site. What happens when a plugin leaves much to be desired? Too much software starts downloading regardless of whether your site needs it or not. In process choosing a plugin, special attention should be paid to ease of use, usability and, most importantly, performance.
Dirty WordPress Database
Old versions and revisions of posts, spam comments, deleted comments and posts irrelevant meta-data, all of this is relevant if you have been using WordPress for a long time.
After cleansing of excess garbage, the database significantly reduces its size, which means that backups are done faster and the performance of the database itself is increasing. Post revisions increase database size by more than 2 times. Let’s think whether we are doing business by storing in the database the previous revisions of already read and published content?
Disregard firewall web-site
It is a mistake to think that the site is safe because it is not of interest to hackers. According to statistics, hackers attack sites on WordPress approximately 90,000 times per minute. When developers write code, it’s almost impossible not to leave some kind of security vulnerability; hackers find them and use them for hacking. A firewall is a program acting as a filter between the Internet and your website. The main goal is to protect your site from obvious hacker attacks, hacking.
Unnecessary page and post redirects
It happens that in recent times you have deleted several pages of the site, used any other platform (not the WordPress), or made any important changes to the site. However, other sites and search engines that continue to link to your site will remember your old URLs. These URLs point already to a dead page or a red page with the name “301 Moved Permanently” or a page that cannot be found. Why? Because your server continues to go to the old pages before going to the real pages for today.
Using of outdated version of PHP
Sites using the old version of PHP run slower because Random Access Memory is consumed plus this leads to exceeding the limits. To add speed to the site you have to use caching plugins, sacrifice functionality, etc, but in this way, we solve the problem only partially. The speed of sites affects its place in search engines. The slower the site works- the lower it’s in search results. Why? Because search engines compete with each other, who will be able to deliver information better and faster. The users will refuse the search engine which palm off substandard websites. Therefore, the use of old versions of PHP threatens with the loss of traffic to your site, as well as the occurrence of problems with ranking.
Conclusion
So today we figured out what reasons can affect the speed of your site. If, while reading an article, you thought that one of these reasons described maybe the reality of slow working your site, try to follow the recommendations and fix it. Maintaining the site clean and tidy all that is needed to make the user’s time on your site enjoyable and the owner’s mood calm.
We invite you to consider the plugins developed by our company for you, maybe you will find what was missing for the smooth operation of your website.
