How To Speed Up Your Slow WordPress Website: WordPress websites are known for being slow. When you have a WordPress website and you don’t take care of it, then things can get really messy and it can slow down your site.

But this isn’t just WordPress, this is the same with almost any website.

Without the right initial setup and optimisations, your website is almost guaranteed to become slow as time goes on.

In this video I want to go over the 4 most common reasons why your WordPress website is so slow, and how to fix them.

Poor Quality Hosting

Firstly is slow or poor quality hosting that doesn’t match your level of traffic or site.

If you want to be the next Amazon, you can’t expect to pay £2.99 a month for hosting.

A high-quality web host will make a world of difference, I can guarantee it. Hosts like Siteground, Cloudways, WPX Hosting, and many others are some I would recommend. I won’t go into this too much as it can get quite confusing, but trust me, a new host is a must!

Although this can be quite daunting. Moving your website from one host to the other is fairly simple. If you’re thinking of doing this, but need professional help. Feel free to get in touch with us.

Caching

Secondly is caching. For those who are non-technical and this is your first time setting up or optimising a WordPress website, caching is crucial for WordPress.

A key component of getting WordPress to run fast is to use caching. Caching prebuilds each page on your site so all the thinking and processing required to serve the page to the visitor is done before they request the page from your web server.

There are a variety of free and paid options – here are some of the best:

WP Fastest Cache – https://en-gb.wordpress.org/plugins/wp-fastest-cache/

LiteSpeed Cache – https://en-gb.wordpress.org/plugins/litespeed-cache/

WP Super Cache – https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-super-cache/

Hummingbird – https://wordpress.org/plugins/hummingbird-performance/

WP Rocket – https://wp-rocket.me/

Optimise & Compress Images

I can’t even tell you how many times I have optimised a website, and the first thing I have seen is 12MB photos all across the website.

When you’re paying very little for your hosting, you’re not getting much memory. So if you’re using massive images, you’re images are going to be eating that data up instantly.

A website that I highly recommend is called squoosh. It’s made by Google I believe and it’s amazing. You can change the image size, and how much the image is compressed.

Squoosh is great as you can lower the size of your image by 90-99% most of the time, and you also don’t lose the quality of your photos.

Plugins

Plugins are a fantastic part of WordPress which allows you to easily bolt on new features to your website without any hassle at all.

But if you start installing hundreds of plugins and don’t deactivate them when you’re finished, it can become an issue, and code can start to clash.

This is especially important for older sites – take an inventory of the plugins you’re using and disable or delete any that you’re no longer using. Fewer plugins are better from a speed perspective.

Plugins that insert analytics codes, live chat code, or remarketing code can also be very heavy from a speed perspective.

If you’re not too keen on reading all of this, then please check out the YouTube video we made for this.

How To Speed Up Your Slow WordPress Website: So that’s it! Go through all of these, and have a go. Experiment and see what works best.