In this blog, we are going to discuss on top reasons why your website is slow. Your website’s success greatly depends on its speed. It influences a number of important variables, such as your site’s visibility and conversion rate. Although improving the speed of your website is obviously important, doing so can be challenging.
Fortunately, you can use a number of easily accessible speed tests to figure out how well your site performs. Although there are a number of potential causes for your site’s slowness, you can address a lot of them with free WordPress plugins and reliable web hosting.
We’ll discuss why site speed is so important to your website in this piece. Afterward, we’ll discuss fixes for 12 frequent problems that might result in subpar website performance. Let’s begin straight away!
Once you are aware of how your site is currently performing, you may begin to optimize the major elements that affect site speed. Let’s examine 5 of the most typical issues that cause websites to load slowly and talk about how to fix them.
1. Render-Blocking JavaScript Is Delaying Page Loads:
JavaScript is the programming that enables users to interact with and utilize your website. Your website would be really boring without it. JavaScript, however, might cause delays when your pages attempt to load in consumers’ browsers if it is not optimized.
All JavaScript files that a browser comes upon must be stopped and fully loaded before it can attempt to display a webpage. As a result, “render-blocking JavaScript” or JavaScript that slows down page loading is produced.
Each approach has benefits and drawbacks. In general, using inline JavaScript sparingly will increase page speed. While files are not loaded in any specific order, asynchronous loading can result in problems. Consequently, it is typically advised to postpone JavaScript.
2. You’re Not Using a Content Delivery Network (CDN):
A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is made up of a number of servers positioned in key geographic areas. They can be used to keep copies of your website so that people who are far from your main server can rapidly load its pages.
Several CDN alternatives are available for your WordPress website. One of the most well-known options is Cloudflare, together with the Jetpack CDN for photos and videos. Customers of our DreamPress Plus and Pro plans are entitled to unlimited Jetpack-powered CDN usage.
If your website utilizes jQuery, you can also load it from a CDN rather than your own server. For the same results, jQuery utilizes a lot fewer lines of code than JavaScript, making it particularly helpful for
3. There’s Excessive Overhead in Your Database:
Logs, transients, and other entries from plugins or themes can accumulate over time, and these extraneous items are referred to as “overhead” in the database of your website. Database searches may take longer than they need to if there is too much of this “overhead”. It may even result in your web server timed out while awaiting a response from your database in some circumstances.
This can be avoided by optimizing your database and minimizing overhead. Most web servers let you use your hosting account to access the phpMyAdmin database administration system. You can utilize the WordPress Command Line interface if you can’t optimize your tables in phpMyAdmin (WP-CLI).
4. Your Site’s CSS Isn’t Optimized:
The CSS code on your website, which is used to style the pages, might cause loading times to increase, similar to JavaScript. You can use several strategies to organize your CSS, including:
- Combine many external CSS files into one or a few files if you have them.
- Use inline CSS instead of external CSS.
- To determine the order in which specific CSS files should be loaded, use “media types”.
Inline CSS is only suitable for brief sections of code, just like inline JavaScript. You shouldn’t attempt to include all of your huge CSS files in your HTML file if you have numerous of them. A more noticeable difference should be made by specifying media types and merging your external CSS files (if you have more than one).
5. OPcache Isn’t Enabled:
The caching engine for the PHP programming language is called OPcache. Having OPcache enabled can accelerate the loading of PHP and your website’s pages if you utilize it.
OPcache is automatically enabled if you host your website with one of our Shared WordPress or DreamPress services. You’ll probably need to manually enable it if your site is hosted with one of our other plans or with another web host.
Do a traceroute between your machine and your website to evaluate the connection if you experience sluggish browsing performance? This should help you determine whether the issue is specific to your ISP or more broadly applicable to the entire website.