Due to its relative simplicity, incredible extensibility, and zero-dollar-core-cost, WordPress has become the CMS of choice for over 455 million websites worldwide. That means WordPress powers 38% of all websites<\/a> on the internet!<\/p>\n While there are many reasons why WordPress is a great platform, there are a few elements that may need to be addressed to ensure your WP based website performs at its highest potential.<\/p>\n Essentially, yes.<\/p>\n The time it takes for your website\u2019s pages to load is an important factor in user experience, which can significantly impact your website\u2019s effectiveness at converting visitors into leads\/sales\/revenue for your business.<\/p>\n An industry study indicated that pages loading in under 2.4 seconds averaged a conversion rate of 1.9%<\/strong>, while conversion rates for pages loading in ~4 seconds averaged less than 1%<\/strong> and rates for page\u2019s with >5.5 second load time were <0.6%<\/strong>.<\/p>\n A simple one-second increase in page load time can mean as much as a 25-30% decrease in conversion rate. A slightly slower page could be costing your business some serious revenue.<\/p>\n Google has been thinking about website speed for a while now. The time it takes for a web page to load has been on Google\u2019s radar and an integrated part of their algorithm for over 10 years.<\/p>\n Site speed was officially introduced as an organic search ranking signal<\/a> way back in April of 2010 – and later acknowledged as a factor in Google Search Ad quality score<\/a>. As mobile-first indexation came on the scene, Google confirmed PageSpeed as a ranking factor for mobile searches<\/a>.<\/p>\n Google is so serious about user experience and page loading speed in particular that it has provided webmasters with comprehensive tools for gaining important insights on how their websites perform. Using these tools, we can establish precisely which issues are impacting a website\u2019s speed the most.<\/p>\n PageSpeed Insights is the primary tool Google has provided us to review important details regarding our website\u2019s loading experience.<\/p>\n The most critical insights and metrics provided by this tool are:<\/p>\n First Contentful Paint (FCP)<\/strong><\/p>\n Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)<\/strong><\/p>\n Time To Interactive (TTI)<\/strong><\/p>\n Opportunities & Diagnostics Suggestions<\/strong><\/p>\n This Chrome Extension allows you to integrate the Lighthouse\/PageSpeed Insights tool directly into your Chrome inspection console for quick & easy access.<\/p>\n A Google-provided resource for web developers to learn and measure the impact of various methodologies and techniques. This is a great go-to resource that takes the insights gained from PageSpeed Insights\/Lighthouse and \u201ccranks them up to 11,\u201d providing helpful, deep-dive explanations around the various technologies and nuanced solutions that impact and improve user experiences and web page loading.<\/p>\n Pingdom<\/a> & GT Metrix<\/a> are also very popular and helpful tools for understanding how your website\u2019s pages are loading, identifying issues, and discovering how to remediate those issues.<\/p>\n The most critical details these tools provide are a view at total page size, total number of individual file requests, total page load time, and several waterfall views of file loading behavior in the case of Pingdom.<\/p>\n While there are many reasons why a website might be slow, we\u2019ve worked on enough WordPress websites to have observed some common issues that can be resolved with a little focused effort.<\/p>\n Shared hosting is cheap and usually pretty \u2018bare-bones.\u2019 The most relevant and limiting factor is that critical performance resources (server memory & CPU bandwidth) are shared by many other websites hosted on the same server.<\/p>\n With many websites using the same resources, your website must wait its turn to process every request for pages or assets – users experience significantly slower page loads as a result.<\/p>\n The core codebase of the WordPress platform is PHP, including all of the many available plugins. Newer versions of PHP have considerably improved request handling and much lower latency. Updating your server to use the latest version of PHP (currently PHP 7.4) can provide significant improvements in performance.<\/p>\n Having your website hosted on a server using an old, outdated version of PHP will seriously slow your website down.<\/p>\n One major issue that often bottlenecks a WordPress website\u2019s loading speed is slow DNS response.<\/p>\n DNS (Domain Name System\/Domain Name Server) is often described as \u201ca phone book for the internet.\u201d It connects a request for a domain name (IE domain.com) to its actual network address – which is a static IP (IE 66.249.95.255) pointing to a specific location on a specific server where the website\u2019s files are hosted.<\/p>\n Slow DNS lookup responses mean every single request takes longer than it could or should – significantly increasing a web site\u2019s potential load time.<\/p>\n A dedicated, speed-focused DNS service can perform those lookups far quicker than most default DNS providers – improving the DNS request response time and expediting the load speed of your website\u2019s pages.<\/p>\n Cloudflare offers a free option for their fast DNS service (in addition to several higher-grade options with more features). The setup is super simple and can be done in just a few minutes.<\/p>\n Step 1<\/strong>: Sign up for the free at CloudFlare.com<\/a><\/p>\n There are many WordPress plugins whose primary intent is to speed up your website. Unfortunately, many of them are ineffective, and some can actually slow it down rather than speed it up.<\/p>\n WP Rocket is a really effective tool for improving the speed of a WordPress-based website. We\u2019re not an affiliate or anything; we\u2019ve just had really good performance improvements from using it, so we\u2019re happy to recommend it.<\/p>\n Some of the core features of WP Rocket include the integration of page caching, cache preloading, GZIP compression, DB optimization, Google Fonts optimization, LazyLoad, HTML\/CSS\/JS minification & consolidation, Defer\/ASYNC JS loading, CloudFlare integration, CDN integration, and DNS prefetching.<\/p>\n Images can have the appropriate measurements and still be a considerably larger file size than is necessary. Compression removes unnecessary data to decrease file size while maintaining the full visual experience.<\/p>\n 7. Slow WordPress plugins<\/p>\n Each plugin adds its own HTML, CSS, and JS files that must be loaded every time a page is requested from the server. This can add several additional seconds to each page\u2019s load time.<\/p>\n On top of that, there are some plugins that are particularly resource-intensive that can seriously impact page load speed.<\/p>\n WordPress is a great platform choice for a small business website. There are many great built-in features, and new features can easily be integrated through its incredible plugin extensibility.<\/p>\n While there are some potential issues that could cause a WordPress website to be slow, hindering user experience, and potentially impacting organic rankings performance – there are a lot of manageable resolutions that can keep your WP-based website quick and visitor friendly.<\/p>\n Optimizing your WordPress site can be a lot of work to manage & maintain, but you\u2019ll be amazed at the tremendous difference in your website\u2019s performance potential.<\/p>\n Learn more about how to optimize your website to perform better in organic search and drive more traffic & revenue by contacting V Digital Services today<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" WordPress is a ridiculously popular content management system (CMS) used by global brands like Disney, Sony Music, BBC, and Microsoft. So why are some WordPress websites so incredibly slow? Due to its relative simplicity, incredible extensibility, and zero-dollar-core-cost, WordPress has become the CMS of choice for over 455 million websites worldwide. That means WordPress powers […] KEEP READING<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":20738,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vdigitalservices.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18631"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vdigitalservices.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vdigitalservices.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vdigitalservices.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vdigitalservices.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18631"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.vdigitalservices.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18631\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vdigitalservices.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20738"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vdigitalservices.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18631"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vdigitalservices.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18631"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vdigitalservices.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18631"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Does it matter that your WordPress website is slow?<\/h2>\n
PageSpeed is a factor in conversion rate<\/h3>\n
![\"page-load-time-impacts-conversion-rate\"](\"https:\/\/www.vdigitalservices.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/page-load-time-impacts-conversion-rate.png\")
<\/p>\nPageSpeed is a Google Ranking Factor<\/h3>\n
Google tools to test if your WordPress site is slow<\/h3>\n
![\"google-pagespeed-insights-tool-screenshot\"](\"https:\/\/www.vdigitalservices.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/google-pagespeed-insights-tool-screenshot.jpg\")
Google PageSpeed Insights<\/a><\/h4>\n\n
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Google Lighthouse extension for Chrome<\/a><\/h4>\n
Web.dev tools<\/a><\/h4>\n
Other tools to test why your WordPress site is slow<\/h3>\n
![\"why-is-my-wordpress-site-so-slow\"](\"https:\/\/www.vdigitalservices.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/why-is-my-wordpress-site-so-slow.jpg\")
<\/h2>\nWhy is my WordPress site so slow?<\/h2>\n
Common reasons WordPress websites are slow<\/h3>\n
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Our simple guide to speed up your WordPress website<\/h2>\n
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1. Using dedicated, managed hosting can speed up WordPress<\/h2>\n
Shared vs. Managed WordPress Hosting<\/h3>\n
Why is shared hosting so slow?<\/h4>\n
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Why is dedicated, managed WordPress hosting so much faster?<\/h4>\n
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2. A server with the latest PHP will speed up WordPress<\/h2>\n
Ensure your host uses the latest version of PHP (PHP 7 +)<\/h3>\n
![\"speed-up-wordpress-update-php-version\"](\"https:\/\/www.vdigitalservices.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/speed-up-wordpress-update-php-version.png\")
Unfortunately, many cheap web hosting solutions do not update or maintain their server\u2019s version of PHP. Many of the shared hosting providers we\u2019ve reviewed have PHP versions as old as 5.x, which has considerably poorer request handling and high latency, both of which contribute to poorer page loading performance.<\/p>\n3. High-Speed DNS servers will speed up WordPress<\/h2>\n
![\"how-does-dns-work\"](\"https:\/\/www.vdigitalservices.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/how-does-dns-work.jpg\")
A web page is made up of many separate files (images, CSS, JS, code, tracking pixels, videos, etc.), and each of these files can be from different domains. Each domain lookup takes time, and a page with assets from multiple domains needs to perform a lookup for each domain – each file requires a DNS lookup and then a connection request; then a download, and the browser running the file.<\/p>\nUse a high-speed DNS service like CloudFlare or Google Cloud DNS<\/h4>\n
Setting up Cloudflare high-speed DNS service<\/h4>\n
![\"cloudfare-login-DNS\"](\"https:\/\/www.vdigitalservices.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/cloudfare-login-DNS.png\")
Step 2<\/strong>: Add your website
\nStep 3<\/strong>: Log into your domain registrar to set your nameservers to the URLs provided by Cloudflare<\/p>\n4. Installing WP Rocket will help speed up WordPress<\/h2>\n
![\"wp-rocket-package-features\"](\"https:\/\/www.vdigitalservices.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/wp-rocket-package-features-e1606332684289.png\")
<\/p>\nHere are the WP Rocket settings we feel are most critical:<\/h2>\n
Cache tab settings<\/h4>\n
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File Optimization tab settings<\/h4>\n
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Media tab settings<\/h4>\n
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Other factors that make your WordPress website slow<\/h2>\n
5. Poorly optimized image files<\/h3>\n
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6. Out of data WordPress platform or plugins<\/h3>\n
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Popular WordPress plugins that slow your site down<\/h4>\n
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8. Inefficient WordPress themes<\/h3>\n
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Optimize the performance of your WordPress website<\/h2>\n