Troubleshooting a Slow WordPress Website

Test the speed of your website with Google’s PageSpeed Insights.

Waiting more than 1.65 seconds may result in a customer leaving the site (known as a bounce rate) and searching for a different solution offered on a faster competitor’s website. According to Google assessments conducted in 2017, bounce rates increase 32% when website page load times rise from 1 second to 3 seconds! That’s proof that nobody likes a slow WordPress website.

In 2024, optimal page load times are 0–2 seconds. Adding more time results in lower engagement, conversion, customer referrals, and search engine traffic.

Luckily, there are methods for measuring and improving on-page speed metrics. However, gaining insight into page speed takes time and requires carefully auditing of many website aspects.

7 Steps to Improve Speed  and Landing Page Performance

1. Evaluate the Platform: Consider whether the codebase of your website is open source and if it has a reputation for speed and performance. WordPress websites meet both of those requirements.
2. Assess Performance with Core Web Vitals (CWV): Insight gained from CWV illustrates how website visitors interpret and use the site. These metrics calculate the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) or how fast a webpage loads. Combined with Interaction to Next Paint (INP), which gauges the interactivity of clicks, taps, and key presses, and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), which measures the website’s structure and stability, these three indicators allow you to analyze your website from a search engine perspective.
3. Choose the Right Theme: The WordPress Block Editor offers the lightest, cleanest option for responsive website design and development. It consistently ranks faster on speed tests in load times and content creation than traditional themes and non-native builders.
4. Optimize Images: The WordPress Block Editor natively compresses images, allowing page images to match the needed size, resulting in a faster load time. Additionally, many image compression plugins enhance this further.
5. Activate Browser Caching: Determine and cache any assets web browsers need to accelerate webpage load times for returning visitors. Without caching, the website must repeatedly refresh the content, which takes longer.
6. Evaluate Hosting and Employ a Content Delivery Network (CDN): Web hosting service performance and pricing vary widely. Migrating to a new host and service may be a worthwhile answer, particularly if the host provides a CDN. A CDN identifies user locations and provides users with data from their nearest server, reducing load times globally.
7. Remove Unnecessary Files and Optimize CSS Delivery: When above-the-fold content loads first, visitors view the site as blazing fast. Removing unneeded CSS, JavaScript, and plugin files, and activating asynchronous file loading also speeds sites up.

As you can see, many factors determine website page speed. Following the seven steps outlined above will transform your slow website, allowing you to deliver rapid results and an enhanced user experience.

Are you still struggling to improve your slow WordPress website? Contact WebDevStudios. We’d love to look under the hood of your WordPress site and make recommendations.

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