If you’re currently reading this, chances are that you want to start a WordPress Website and you’d like to find out if WordPress Websites are slow.
WordPress Websites need Themes and Plugins to work and all these are JS, CSS, and HTML codes.
If you understand the entire process that takes place when a browser is loading a URL, you’ll know that WordPress Websites aren’t designed to be fast… I think.
But that doesn’t mean that you can’t speed up your WordPress Website, I have WP sites that fully load in under 2 seconds and score 90+ on mobile according to Pagespeed Insights.
Common Reasons why WordPress Sites are Slow.
I analyzed 10,578 sites powered by WordPress using Pagespeed Insights and here are the common reasons why WordPress Websites are slow:
- Large Image Sizes.
- Cheap Hosting Plans.
- No Content Delivery Network.
- Caching.
- Ads.
Large Image Sizes
Most WordPress websites need to have outstanding clear images, this mostly includes image directory websites.
These images are in formats like .PNG which doesn’t allow much compression.
According to Google Pagespeed Insights recommendations, you should serve images in next-gen formats like .webp which is lower in size and compressible.
Cheap Hosting Plans
From my data, I noticed that a couple of these WordPress Sites purchased hosting plans from Hosting companies whose servers aren’t fast at all.
This led to these sites getting the ‘Improve Server Response Time’ suggestion when they check their site speed on Pagespeed Insights.
The only way around this is to switch hosting and move to one of the following Fast WordPress Hosts:
Hostinger is my favorite web hosting, I don’t think any of my sites have been down for a second since switching and I’ve seen a 10% increase in Pagespeed Insights scores.
No CDN
CDN stands for Content Delivery Network, what a CDN does is that it caches your web pages and stores them in servers all over the world for easy access to your visitors.
A Visitor from the UK can get the content of your site as fast as a visitor from the USA which in this example is your WordPress Host’s location.
The only WordPress Hosting Company that offers a free CDN that I know of is Namecheap and they offer the SuperSonic CDN.
If you don’t want to switch to Namecheap hosting, you can simply signup for Cloudflare with your website and enjoy the free features.
Caching
The priority for you in speeding up your WordPress Website is by using a Cache Plugin.
There are a lot of great Cache Plugins which can speed up your site but here are my top 3:
If you don’t understand how Caching works… once a visitor visits your website for the first time, certain files and resources are stored on their device and this helps your site load significantly faster the next time they visit.
This is important as it can help you improve Core Web Vitals which are now a part of the Google Page Experience Ranking Signal.
Ads
A major percentage of these sites which I tested and analyzed were all Monetizing their websites with ads, mostly Ezoic, Mediavine, and AdSense Ads.
Sites with Ezoic and Mediavine Ads passed Core Web Vitals but their Pagespeed Insights scores we’re all “Dark Red“, this is simply because Ezoic and Mediavine Ads are optimized for Core Web Vitals.
The Sites load slowly because these files add extra JS and HTML to their pages and this increases page size which means that browsers need more time to parse the content.
Final Thoughts
I hope you enjoyed reading this article and that you’ve decided to start a WordPress Website because I have a solid tutorial for that.
If you already have a WordPress Website, I have a category on this website where I aim to proffer solutions to every single WordPress issue which WordPress users may be facing, this means there are more articles for you to read.
Have any more questions on WordPress? Feel free to ask me in the comments section, I’d be happy to reply.
