Why is my site so slow?
📝 Note: Take a look at any of our theme demos – for Neve or Hestia – you’ll see that they perform rather well, even despite being emulated on the fly.
If you bought a theme from us and once it is installed and configured, you realize that it is very slow, here are the most common issues:
5. You are using big images - Use Optimole for image optimization (it's free).
Make sure your images aren't bigger than 500KB - 1MB ( for the bigger ones ).
📝 Note: Nowadays you can find images at really high resolutions and with a size of up to 10-20MB, however uploading an image like this to your site will make the loading animation that we have on some of our themes load forever.
On most sites, images account for the majority of bandwidth consumption.
Example:
The small image you see here is 35KB.
However, the whole text content of the message you’re reading now – the whole thing, from top to bottom – is only around 7KB.
How does the Optimole work?
It improves your website’s performance by reducing the image size drastically and serving through CDN, covering up to 110 server locations worldwide. It maintains the image quality even after optimizing it.
📝 Note: Talking monetarily, it is "freemium". The free plan, it serves up to 5000 visits /month.
📝 Note: You can even test your images here.
Quick steps to optimize images in WordPress:
- Download and Install the Optimole WordPress plugin.
- Sign up for Free at https://optimole.com/ and copy the API key from the Dashboard.
- Paste it in Optimole Panel in the WP Dashboard and click "Connect to Optimole Service". It will get connected and start optimizing the images automatically.
📝 Note: See Optimole's full guide here.
4. You have a lot of plugins - Check Health Check (is free )
📝 Note: Most of the plugins add CSS/JS on their own, so on top of the theme, you might have a lot of code that slows down your site.
You have to analyze the problem from 2 perspectives:
- back-end - check Health Check to analyze the plugin's back-end performance.
- front-end - look with View-Source and see what scripts the plugins are adding.
📝 Note: It might not work for you. What to do then?
Quick steps to find the slow plugins manually:
- Take a backup using Updraftplus WordPress Backup Plugin.
- Deactivate all plugins.
- Activate the plugins one by one and check how the different pages are performing on each activation.
3. Hook up your site to StackPath (previously MaxCDN)
CDN (Content Delivery Network) – a network of servers that deliver your website to the visitor from the nearest geographic location possible.
📝 Note: The data has less distance to travel; therefore it can get to your visitor quicker.
The free CDN services (like the native one for images provided by WordPress.com) will only take you so far.
StackPath offers a range of features and performance improvements that you won’t find with the free alternatives.
📝 Note: Their Starter Plans go for $9/mo. For that, you get 100GB of bandwidth/mo.
2. Go for a good caching tool like WP Cloudflare Super Page Cache
WP Cloudflare Super Page Cache delivers really impressive performance improvements while it helps you boost your website. It improves the process by caching not only the static files (e.g. CSS, JS, images ) but also the HTML webpages generated by WordPress.
Features:
- 🎈 Developed to work flawlessly with any Cloudflare Plan (Cloudflare Free, Pro, Business, or Enterprise account ).
- 💌 Cache Buster Support to ensure logged-in users don’t see cached content.
- 📝 Ability to overwrite our default Worker code to add your custom login.
1. Use a good web host
A good web host can mean the difference between successful and failed websites.
The best overall hosting plan, according to this study, comes from SiteGround. They deliver the best average loading times and minimum and maximum response times (as analyzed with LoadImpact and Pingdom).
📝 Note: You can start with the cheapest, $3.95 / mo. But going one step up is a better idea – $7.95 / mo. It gives you 20GB of disk space, the ability to run multiple websites, and it can handle up to 25,000 visitors monthly.