Common WordPress Performance issues & How to Fix Them
According to Google’s benchmark findings published in February 2018, a two to four second loading time is ideal for a business website, but many sites still aren’t up to standard. Then, in November 2019, Google Chrome announced that it plans to identify and label slow-loading websites.
Let’s dig deeper into the impacts of a slow website before diagnosing how to fix these issues.
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Eight out of ten users that have experienced a slow-loading site never return to the same website again. Even worse, 44% of these users will tell their friends about the bad user experience.
Common WordPress Performance Issues (& How to Fix Them)
1. Slow Web Host
You can apply all the WordPress speed optimization tricks in the books, but having a slow web host will negate many of your best efforts.
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Whenever a person loads a new web page, the corresponding files are pulled from the web servers that store them. Thus, having a web host with a fast server is essential.
2. Heavy Web Traffic
Not every website has to worry about the implications of heavy traffic, but there are few webmasters who don’t count increased traffic as a goal. And since you can’t necessarily plan for the possibility that your website goes viral, you’ll want to prepare for the possibility of heavy traffic at any given moment.
Again, optimizing your online presence for the best user experience comes back to your web host and the specific plan you’re on. You have to make sure that your chosen web host can handle continually changing web traffic.
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3. Server Location
Your server location also plays a factor in why websites load slow.
4. Code Density
Is WordPress slow? Why is WordPress backend so slow? The answer depends on your specific setup.
Large (or dense) elements such as WordPress plugins and themes can add up and impact page speed. Having a lot of plugins can slow your site down in the same way that a few plugins and a dense theme can do.
5. Too Many HTTP Requests
Yahoo states that 80% of a page’s page speed correlates to downloading the files that make it up, such as style sheets (CSS), scripts, and images.
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HTTP requests are generated for each of these files. In other words, the more files that need to be loaded, the more HTTP requests you’ll receive, and the longer it will take the page to eventually render.
6. Size-Heavy Images and Videos
People are visual creatures. Marketers often use imagery to help their brand message stick with customers.
When people hear information, they’re only likely to remember 10% of it. However, if the information is presented visually, they are likely to retain 65% of it.
7. Site is Not Regularly Updated
WordPress is open-source, and its core code is continuously being updated. These updates are essential to help fix issues and bugs, which is vital for security purposes.
8. Undetected Malware
Malware (short for malicious software) is an umbrella term for software that leverages your site and server resources for various harmful activities. A security breach affects a site’s performance in general: from SEO to user experience and site speed.
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With all of the work that goes into website design, it can be easy to push the implications of poor WordPress performance to the back burner.
But based on the potential impacts of a bloated theme, shared web host, and size-heavy visual assets, it’s clear that performance isn’t something you can wait to worry about until after the design stage wraps.
