The DIY Guide to Speeding Up Your Slow WordPress Website
Do you have a slow WordPress website? Well, you’re not alone. Many people who start to use WordPress for their blog or small business quickly realize they need to make upgrades to keep up with the demand. There are many reasons why your site may be slowing down, including an outdated theme, too many plugins, and more.
We’ve worked with over 4000 satisfied clients to help them speed up their website. We’ve seen sites go from taking over a minute and a half to load all the way down to 100 milliseconds!
Today, we want to share with you our Easy-to-Follow DIY guide on how to speed up your WordPress site on your own. We will show you step by step how to speed up your website, so it’s not only running smoothly, but also loading quickly!
And if you’re looking for an expert solution, check out our premium WordPress speed optimization service here.
Reasons Why Your WordPress Site Loading Slowly
To fix your WordPress site’s speed issue, you need to understand the underlying reason why it is running slow. Many reasons can cause a website or blog to run slowly.
Our DIY Guide will help you find the following eight most common reasons:
- Poor or Slow Hosting Provider
- Insufficient Server Resources
- Caching Not Set Up Properly or No Caching at All
- Not Using a CDN (Content Delivery Network)
- Images Not Compressed or Not Optimized
- Not Forcing HTTPS
- Using an Old Version of PHP
- Outdated Plugins & Themes
These are some of the most common reasons that cause a WordPress site to run slowly. Obviously, many other reasons are not mentioned here, but the above issues are usually the culprits for most speed problems.
Detailed Guide to Fix Common Causes of a Slow WordPress Site
If you’re wondering how to tackle any of the issues above, we’ve included a detailed guide anyone can do on their own.
Migrate to a Faster Hosting Provider
We’ve been working with clients from all around the world for over ten years now, and the most common cause of a slow WordPress site is Bad Hosting!
Hosting plays a huge role in the performance of your site. You can have the most beautiful, high converting website out there, but if your hosting provider is giving you subpar service, it’s going to show. This goes for any platform – not just WordPress!
Today, many companies are offering cheap shared hosting plans to lure in customers with their low monthly rates. However, these types of hosts typically provide very few resources for your site and have been known to cram up to 10,000 sites on a single server!
Moving your site to a high-quality hosting provider with proper resources and up-time will immediately improve your site’s speed and loading time.
Fast Hosting Providers for WordPress Sites:
- Kinsta, is one of the most reliable and fastest WordPress hosting providers. Their platform is built on NGINX technology and is hosted on Google Cloud servers. They also provide other critical features for a speedy site like built-in caching, CDN integration, and the latest PHP Version.
- Cloudways, are leaders in the VPS hosting industry. They’ve built a platform that allows you to control and easily optimize your hosting environment. You can customize your server’s resources and scale your VPS to meet traffic demands and tackle a slow site.
- WP Engine, is another great WordPress hosting platform. They offer state-of-the-art infrastructure and premium customer support to ensure your website is always on, fast, secure, and up-to-date no matter what device someone may be using!
- Siteground, is also one of the fastest hosting providers we know, will definitely improve your blog’s loading time. They also provide you with cPanel access, one of the easiest interfaces for beginner site owners to use.
Switching to any of the above hosting providers should be the first step you take to fix your WordPress site’s loading time and overall speed. You should expect to see improved loading and faster response times almost instantly after switching.
Hosting Providers Known to Slow WordPress Sites:
If you’re hosting your site with any of the following companies, you may want to consider switching immediately if speed is an issue.
- GoDaddy, provides cheap shared hosting plans, but at the cost of very few resources.
- Bluehost, known for slamming their customers with hidden fees and slow servers.
- HostGator, Unable to properly handle large amounts of traffic and overload servers, causing a slow response time across the board.
- Melbourne IT, known for overselling its shared hosting plan and poor customer service.
- Crazy domains, offers extremely limited resources on their shared plans compared to competitors.
Importance of Fast Hosting:
The performance and quality of the server you host your site on can make or break your business.
We’ve worked with customers that swear by these cheap shared hosting, but after showing them the results of switching to a premium provider, they were amazed at the difference and could never go back! They saw a noticeable improvement in the speed of their website, not only on desktop devices but mobile as well.
If you’re still wondering why hosting is so important? Well, you’re only as fast as your slowest loading factor. If you host a terrible provider, it doesn’t matter how awesome your website is! It will take forever to load, and customers will leave before even giving you the chance to convert them into leads or sales.
