Having a website that is slow to load can put your business at a big disadvantage. Studies show that a website that takes longer than 2 seconds to load will not only adversely affect your visitors’ experience, but also your sales. If you have a lazy website, you need to get it fixed fast before your competitors steal your potential clients. You may be asking yourself, why is WordPress loading slow? Here are 4 reasons why your WordPress website page speed is lacking:
1. Too many plugins:
Problem: There are thousands of plugins out there, each one promising to enhance your website in its own special way. It’s very easy to get caught up in plugin fever, and before you know it, you have them controlling just about every aspect of your website. The problem with this is, the more plugins you add, the more time and effort it takes your website to load. Furthermore, some plugins can slow down site performance more than others.
Solution: Get an evaluation of your current plugins so that you know which ones you actually As for the others, get rid of them, particularly if you have several plugins which perform the same functions or any that are more than five years old.
2. Overloaded homepage:
Problem: Just because your homepage is typically the first page your visitors will see, that doesn’t mean you have to show off everything you have to over right away. The more widgets you add to your homepage, the longer your site will take to load.
Solution: A clean webpage design is much more impressive than one that is overcrowded. Instead of adding sharing widgets to your homepage, put them at the end of your blog posts where you can maximize their impact. You can also speed up your homepage by using WordPress tools to show excerpts instead of full posts.
3. Excessive images:
Problem: It’s good to use quality images and graphics for your web pages but bear in mind that the higher the quality of the image and the larger its size, the longer it will take to load.
Solution:Limit your use of images and heavy graphics to one or two per page. You can also address your image issue by using an image optimizer program to compact images without losing quality.
4. Poor web host:
Problem: When you run your website with the WordPress platform, you will need a web host for your site. Though there are many free and very inexpensive web hosts out there, a poor web host can slow down your load time.
Solution: Does it seem you’re constantly asking yourself: why is my WordPress site so slow? Well, if you feel your current web hosting services is not up to par, consider upgrading to a more reputable and robust host.
Contact our team at WP SitePlan or give us a call at 866-956-2330 to find out how we can optimize your site speed and Core Web Vitals to draw more visitors and increase your conversion rates with one of our WordPress maintenance plans.
