Why Is My WordPress Website So Slow?

We’ve all experienced it – you click on a website link, and the page takes forever to load. You find yourself staring at a blank screen and wondering if you should give up.

Now imagine that slow site is yours. A slow website can drive visitors away, leaving you with a tarnished business and reputation.

You might be asking: Why is my WordPress site so slow?

The answer is that the issue likely lies in how it’s built. In this guide, we’ll explore the common reasons behind sluggish performance and share actionable tips to help you speed up your site.

Why WordPress Load Speed Matters

Think about the last five websites you visited. How many of them took longer than three seconds to load? Probably none. That’s because three seconds is the benchmark for an acceptable website load time. If your site takes longer, you risk losing visitors.

Whether you’re running an online store, a simple blog, or a site full of images and videos, a slow website can hurt your business in the following ways.

User Experience

If a website takes more than a few seconds to load, users might leave and try another site instead. After all, they’re busy and have plenty of other options online. But, even if they do manage to arrive on your site, they’ll associate that poor experience with your brand.

Site Conversions / Profitability

For every additional second your site takes to load (between 0 and 9 seconds), conversion rates drop by 2.11%. This means that whatever your goal - whether it’s making money or generating leads - you’re losing out on both.

SEO

Site speed is part of Google's page experience system, and Google rewards better page experiences. While not as important as having relevant and high-quality content, it could be the difference you need to score a few more points in your favor. In fact, site speed is just one of the many factors that can impact your SEO performance.

WordPress Slow? Common Reasons for Slow Loading

There are a few things that can slow down your WordPress site. The first step is determining the cause.

Fixing these issues involves some investigation and specific solutions for each problem. We'll guide you through identifying and improving each area.

Slow or Low-Quality Hosting

Your website needs a solid foundation to perform well, and choosing the best web hosting for small businesses is key. A low-quality web hosting provider is often the root cause of site speed issues, and other fixes won’t be as effective until you address this core problem first.

You can use the TTFB (Time to First Byte) test to get even more specific. It's a way to see how quickly your website's server responds when someone types in your URL. There are lots of free online tools you can use to test your site. A slow TTFB could mean there's a problem with the hosting provider.

Hosting providers work differently, and some can offer faster speeds than others. They might have multiple server locations worldwide, which lets them serve content from servers closer to a user's region. Others might have better server hardware and ways to make things work faster.

If a web hosting provider has poor speed, you can try contacting them to see if they can fix it. Sometimes, they can adjust some settings on their end, upgrade you to a higher-performing plan, or even provide some advice on what you can do on your end. If not, the only thing to do is switch providers.

At Softailed, we've analyzed hundreds of potential providers according to strict criteria to come up with the best web hosting providers for performance and speed. In our evaluation, we focused on key web hosting features such as uptime, bandwidth, scalability, and security to make sure you get the best service. Check out our list to find a better alternative to your current host. You can also check out our top picks for Best Web Hosting for SEO.

No Caching

Caching is like prepping your meals for the week. By storing commonly accessed data, you avoid reloading it with each request. This lightens the server workload and speeds up response times.

Without caching, servers must retrieve data again and again, which slows everything down. This is even worse for content-heavy WordPress sites. They often have big themes and plugins that drag down performance if caching isn’t in place. Proper caching makes all the difference.

Most hosting providers have caching settings in the "Speed" tab. If caching is turned off, you can usually switch it on with just one click. If it’s not that simple, your hosting provider can help you enable it for your website.

Depending on your CMS, you might need to install a caching plugin for WordPress.

No CDN

A content delivery network (CDN) is a network of servers located around the world that work together to deliver content to users quickly and efficiently. It works by storing copies of your website's data on multiple servers. When a user accesses your site, the content is delivered from the server closest to their location.

When you don't have a CDN, all your content has to come from one server. If that server is far from your user or overloaded with requests, your website will load slowly.

Some web hosts include basic CDN support in specific plans. Standalone CDN services like Cloudflare speed sites by reducing traffic burdens on your infrastructure. Their free plans cover most needs, which makes CDNs an easy win.

Plugin Problems

It’s easy to get carried away adding plugins when building your WordPress site. There are so many tools and features to try out. A pop-up generator here, a contact form there, and suddenly your site is overloaded with plugins.

Each extra plugin adds weight to your site. Plus, the more you install, the higher the chances they’ll conflict with each other.

Some plugins can slow down your website because they're not well-coded or don't work well with others. Other plugins are outdated and no longer supported by their creators, which can cause security and performance issues.

The best way to tell if that's the reason for your slow site is to set the website on staging mode, remove plugins one by one, and then test the speed. Smaller sites can do this on their live site, but staging mode is highly recommended so you're not disrupting your live website.

Once you've found the plugin that's been causing the issues, either uninstall it or try to find an alternative that works better with your setup.

Lack of Image Optimization

One common reason for a slow website is images. Unlike text, images take up a lot of space and can slow things down if they’re not optimized. A good rule of thumb is that if your page has more than 2MB of data, it will affect load speed.

Luckily, you can keep high-quality images by optimizing them. This process reduces the file size without losing visual quality. There are plenty of online tools to help with this. Google recommends using formats like WebP and AVIF. You can also find WordPress plugins to handle this directly in your CMS or use a bulk optimization plugin if you want to compress existing images without replacing them one by one.

Another tip is to use lazy loading for images, so they only load when the user scrolls down to them. Note that there are best practices around how to do this if you are looking to optimize your site for SEO.

Google's PageSpeed Insights is a useful tool for checking your site's speed and spotting any issues. Run it on your site to see if your images need optimization.

Overall, WordPress makes it pretty easy to improve performance in this area. Even if you don’t handle it yourself, a skilled developer can likely fine-tune things in just a few hours.

Excessive Ads and Pop-ups

Many websites depend on ads or pop-up forms for revenue. The problem is that more ads mean more HTTP requests, and this slows down your site. On top of that, most ads use rich media content, which takes extra time to load.

As we’ve mentioned, slow load times can impact user experience and conversions. Overly intrusive ads can also impact your SEO and organic traffic.

To check if this is the issue, try disabling your ads and pop-ups temporarily, then test your site speed. If it improves, you’ve found the culprit. If you’re using popups, you may also want to assess how that’s influencing the way people interact with your content. Consider conducting A/B testing with and without popups, and with different placements and timing.

The solution? Be strategic with your ads. Analyze which ones are bringing in revenue and remove those that aren’t.

Overall, it's about finding the right balance between revenue and user experience to keep your site performing well in the long run.

Unused CSS and JavaScript

Unused CSS and JavaScript can slow down your site. This extra code often comes from plugins, removed custom features, or unused functions. If it’s not cleaned up, it can become a bigger issue over time.

Google’s PageSpeed Insights is an easy way to spot unnecessary code. It will highlight problematic JavaScript files at the top of the Performance report (see below). Once you identify any unused code, cleaning it up can boost your site’s performance.

Doing so might require some technical skills, so it's best to consult a web developer. Other similar tools for assessing JavaScript and CSS include GTMetrix and Chrome DevTools.

Improperly Configured Database

Your website’s database contains all your website's information, from the text and images to your user's data. If it's not set up correctly, this can lead to slow loading times or even crashes.

In general, you want to remove anything unnecessary from the database (e.g., old post revisions, spam comments, unused images, etc.).

To check if your database is well set up, you can use a plugin like WP-Optimize. These plugins can help you clean up your database and improve its performance.

Conflicting Themes and Plugins

When you install themes and plugins from different developers, they don’t always know how their code will interact with others. Sometimes, this leads to conflicts that cause problems on your website.

For example, two plugins or themes might use the same function names, which can lead to errors. To check if this is the issue, follow the same method as in the plugin section - disable plugins one by one to see if the problem disappears.

You can also search online for “plugin name 1 + plugin 2 conflict” to see if others have faced similar issues. If you find a conflict, it's often best to replace the conflicting plugins or themes with alternatives that work well together. Developers can also help identify and resolve plugin conflicts. They likely also have some knowledge on which plugins tend to cause issues and which ones work best together.

Lastly, it’s important to regularly update your themes and plugins to avoid conflicts with newer versions.

Large Video and Audio Files

We mentioned that images are larger than text, but audio files are even bigger. And videos? They're massive. These files take up a lot of space on your website, which can really slow things down.

That’s why many websites embed videos from platforms like YouTube or Vimeo. This essentially outsources the storage and bandwidth required to handle these large files. If you want to host this kind of content directly on your site, even optimizing it for the web will still create huge storage and hosting demands.

To manage this, you can try lazy loading videos or having them load only when a user interacts with them. Getting this right usually requires the help of a skilled developer.

Not Using HTTP/2 Protocol

HTTP/2 can boost your website’s performance by allowing browsers to handle multiple requests at once over a single connection. As of 2024, most sites use HTTP/2, but it’s still worth checking.

You can use an HTTP2 test tool to see if your site is using the correct protocol.

In rare cases, shared hosting or server restrictions might block HTTP/2, but most of the time, your site should already be running on it.

Conclusion: Speeding Up WordPress

Like any complex system, WordPress sites can face various performance bottlenecks. By systematically checking and fixing each issue using the steps we’ve outlined, you can get your load times back on track. Remember, hosting plays a key role - quality resources are essential for success.

If you’re searching for the best web hosting services, we’ve got you covered. We analyzed more than 42 providers with a custom scoring system to help you quickly find the best option for you. Our detailed review will point you in the right direction, so you can focus on what really matters for your business.