Your WordPress Site is Slow AF! It’s been painstakingly slow for months, maybe even years now. When you first installed it everything was great, but as you’ve added more and more sites, plugins and themes to your setup, the loading times have been getting slower and slower.
There are many reasons for a slow WordPress site, and you need to identify the symptoms of your website for slowness and relate then with the appropriate solution to find the perfact fix to speed up your website.
But to our research and experimenting about 3200 websites we concluded that the most common cause is theme, plugin bloat and images. ofcourse there are many other reason and we will talk about these
Most underated reason – Plugin compatibility
WordPress is a powerful CMS platform that allows you to publish blogs, create e-commerce stores, and more. And with so many features, it’s only natural for a WordPress site to be a bit slower than some other platforms.
The Most underated reason why your WordPress website might be loading slowly is that you have plugins that are not compatible with one another. This could lead to security problems or other issues. It’s best to only have the plugins that are compatible with your WordPress site installed.
To make this process easy there is a free plugin called “Check Conflicts” which can detect conflict and compatibility within all your installed plugins and themes.
Database cleanup to speed up WordPress site
Manually cleaning up a WordPress database is not an easy task. It requires a lot of knowledge and time to do it.
Fortunately, there are many tools that can help you to clean up your WordPress database in just a few minutes.
here is one solution: WP-Optimize plugin, WP-Optimize plugin helps the site owners by cleaning up their databases and speeding up their websites while making sure that all data is secure and intact.
WP-Optimize cleans unused post revisions, old spam comments, other unwanted data from the blog
Optimize Your Image Size
Optimizing your image size is one of the best ways to speed up your wordpress website.
It’s important to know that not all images will load at the same time on a webpage. If the browser is downloading images from a website and there is, for example, an image with an 800px width and another with a 200px width, the browser will download the smaller image first and then move on to download the larger one.
The smaller images will be downloaded first because they take less time to download than larger ones. Optimizing your image size can also help you save bandwidth as well as loading times for those viewers that don’t have high-speed internet connections such as those who live in rural areas or developing countries where broadband speeds are lower than average.
JPG files are usually smaller than PNG files because they compress data which reduces quality so it’s okay to have bigger images in JPG format.
PNG is better for images with logos or photos with lots of colors because they don’t lose quality when they’re compressed like JPG does.
we tested and found ourself that these 3 plugin works amagingly great when it comes to image optimization, you can check these out.
Remove Unnecessary Plugins
WordPress plug-ins are one of the major causes for slow loading speeds.
In order to make your WordPress site load faster, you need to identify those plug-ins that are slowing down your website and then delete them from your WordPress site.
Then keep only those plugins that you have been using on a regular basis and delete the others. This is an easy way to increase website loading speed without making any changes to the code or template files on your website.
so identify all the plugins which are not in use and delete them, remember dont just deactivate them but delete them.
Use right caching plugin
The importance of a WordPress cache plugin cannot be overstated. The use of a caching plugin will greatly increase the performance and speed of website tremendously.
The basic purpose of a cache is to store data from one request in memory so that it does not have to be retrieved again from another source. Caching plugins for WordPress come in two flavors: object cache and page cache. Object caches store data in memory while page caches store data on the hard drive or SSD that the website is hosted on.
The w3 total cache plugin and the wp fast cache plugin are two plugins that can significantly increase the speed of your website. If you want to do this, you will need to make sure that the plugins are activated and configured correctly for your site.
W3 total cache plugin is the most popular caching plugin for WordPress, with over 8 million downloads. It provides various caching mechanisms like browser cache, database cache, object cache and more.
The W3 Total Cache plugin has helped many websites in terms of performance and loading time. It is a must-have plugin that needs to be included in your WordPress website for better functionality.
Change MySQL Server Type from InnoDB to MyISAM
MySQL offers many different storage engines, but by default it uses InnoDB as its default storage engine. However, there are cases where MyISAM storage engine may be more appropriate than InnoDB.
The MyISAM storage engine is a lot lighter on resources than InnoDB does because most operations are handled directly on the disk without needing to go through extra layers of caching. It also doesn’t need to lock tables or rows when reading data from tables that are used concurrently by multiple threads or
It is advisable to use MyISAM for development and testing environments, as it is less resource-intensive. It is also advisable to use MyISAM on systems that do not require transactions or foreign key constraints.
As of MySQL 5.7, it may be necessary to switch the default MySQL server type if you are using the InnoDB storage engine. This change may be necessary because of issues with high-speed double write buffer flushing on modern hardware.
Chose the Right Hosting Provider
The right hosting provider can make all the difference when it comes to your website’s speed.
Since a website is a collection of files, it takes time to load all the files from the server and display them on a webpage. The more files that need to be loaded, the longer it will take for a webpage to load. This is because every computer has certain limitations in terms of how quickly they can pull information from their hard drive and process it. So, if you have too many files for your computer to handle, then loading your web page may require more time than usual or might not even be possible at all.
If you need to optimize your site’s loading time, there are certain aspects of picking the right web host that will help. First, find out about what kind of server they’re using. If they’re not using cloud-based servers like Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft Azure, then it’s likely that it’s running on an outdated legacy system which will slow down your site considerably. Secondly, make sure that they use SSD storage; otherwise, their files will load much more slowly than if they were served from an SSD server.
Webhost 365 provides the best hosting solution with “Support 365” program which provides round the clock support, they also have free plan to start with.
Litespeed vs nginx vs apache web server
Racing the internet is an annual event that pits web servers against each other to see which one is the fastest. This year, Litespeed has taken first place for the first time ever. Litespeed’s web server outperformed nginx and apache in numerous performance tests and benchmarks.
Apache is a web server that was first released in 1995. It’s been around for a long time and has gone through a lot of changes. It’s the second most popular web server on the internet, right behind nginx.
Litespeed is a web server that can be used to replace Apache. It’s been around since 2009 and it has been gaining traction over the last few years because of its capability of handeling thousands of http request per seconds which out performs nginx and apache.
our first choice is litespeed when it comes to faster speed and nginx ofcourse gives a tough competition, we suggest to choose among these 2 only and keep the apache last choice.
ofcourse these 3 web servers differs when it comes to provide features and functionalities but we are just focused on speed here.
Use CDN Services for Faster Load Times
Content Delivery Networks (CDN) are used for making websites faster by delivering content from a server which is geographically closer to the website visitor.
They deliver the content from a server that is geographically closer to the visitor. The result is quicker load times and increased site performance.
A CDN service is a content-delivery network, or CDN. It caches content to reduce the load time by storing the content on servers that are geographically closer to users.
The benefits of using a cdn service are:
– The user sees less loading time for web pages, which can be important for competitive websites that need to maintain high traffic standards.
– A cdn service can help improve the performance of WordPress sites by offloading some of the processing tasks from the website’s server. This means less work for your server and faster load times.
– A cdn service also reduces one’s bandwidth costs because it only needs to serve content from one location instead of multiple locations.
we recommend using the cloudflare CDN as they have a free plan that will suffice for a moderate website, they also provide dns management that even makes the website faster.