Common Causes Why is WordPress Slow

A slow website is bad for business. It is one of the most common reasons why businesses fail. Forrester Research has shown that the majority of web and mobile users expect web pages to load in 2 seconds or less. In addition, research by Bing shows that each 2-second delay in page rendering increases customer abandonment and subsequent revenue loss by an average of 4.3%. The slower your website, the more money you are losing.

This is true not only for eCommerce websites but also for blogs that make their money via Advertising or affiliate commission. A frustrated user will never visit your website again. This will cause your traffic to go down which directly translates to a loss of revenues. 

There are many causes to a slow WordPress site, including the images displayed on the site that aren’t compressed or way too many plugins installed. In this article, we’ll talk about four common causes of a slow website:

Cheap Hosting Providers

While trying to find solutions with the lowest cost is a goal for many businesses, it isn’t necessarily a good one when it comes to choosing a hosting provider for your website. From uptime to security, your host is pretty much what ensures that your website keeps on existing. If you have opted for a cheap plan, it might be because you’re starting small and don’t require the extra resources or features to run the site.

When we did a survey of various hosting providers we are surprised most of the big brands (BlueHost, SiteGround, LiquidWeb & others) are still providing shared hosting on 100MBPS bandwidth speed! Today, I get much faster speed on my mobile. 

If you stick with the cheap hosting plan, your website is going to struggle and will not generate the revenues that you always wanted. What most business owners miss out on is that choosing a poor hosting provider is the cause of their business failure. 

When it comes to WordPress hosting you really get what you pay for. We fully understand that many business owners and other WordPress users are on a tight budget when it comes to the development and hosting of their website. But your hosting decision is the very foundation of having your website be successful. Do not cut corners or go the cheap route with that decision. Invest in a good web hosting company that will become part of your team and there when you need support for any of your website hosting needs.

• 10 GBPS Port Speed
• PHP 7.4 with FPM
• HTTP/2
• NginX
• SSD RAID 10

PHP Version & Process Manager

Updates are often carried out for many reasons—enhanced security, increased performance, additional features, and so on. Even if all your website’s components are up to date, it will still be slow if the foundation of it all is outdated. The foundation? PHP. It is also essential to see which PHP Process Manager is being used. I have always been recommending PHP-FPM.

PHP-FPM

PHP FastCGI Process Manager (PHP-FPM) is an alternative FastCGI daemon for PHP that allows a website to handle strenuous loads. PHP-FPM maintains pools (workers that can respond to PHP requests) to accomplish this. PHP-FPM is faster than traditional CGI-based methods, such as SUPHP, for multi-user PHP environments. It does not overload a system’s memory with PHP from Apache processes.

PHP-FPM features include:

• Adaptive process spawning.
• Basic statistics (ala Apache’s mod_status)
• Advanced process management with graceful stop/start
• Ability to start workers with different uid/gid/chroot/environment and different php.ini (replaces safe_mode)
• Stdout & stderr logging.
• Emergency restart in case of accidental opcode cache destruction.
• Accelerated upload support.
• Support for a “slowlog”.
• Enhancements to FastCGI, such as fastcgi_finish_request() – a special function to finish request & flush all data while continuing to do something time-consuming (video converting, stats processing, etc.)

Pros

• It has a modern and optimized way of running applications.
• Robust performance for busier websites and low resources consumption.
• Smaller memory footprint, graceful reload without stopping other queries.

Cons

• Low security as compared to PHP-CGI.
• Requires more configuration than PHP-CGI.
• Which should be preferred?

According to us if you have a heavy and busier website you need to use PHP-FPM. If CGI is used then the essential web server process might end up in a deadlock situation which may lead to website downtime. If you have a basic website and low traffic then you should use PHP-CGI as it has better PHP code Execution and will not use many resources on small and low traffic websites.

Website Isn’t Cached

When a visitor enters your website, their browser sends a request to the server to receive the files of the site to load in for the visitor to see. These files include pictures, scripts, design elements, and all sorts of other files. If you have a lot of files on your website, loading will take a while, especially if its content is dynamic as well.

Generally, dynamic content takes a lot longer to load compared to static content. When you cache your website, you store a static version of your website, allowing visitors to retrieve that file to load quicker. In other words, if your website isn’t cached, the server will slow down trying to respond to multiple requests at one time, which, in turn, increases the visitor’s loading time too.

There are some amazing caching plugins available out there that you can easily install on your WordPress website and get instant results and a huge speed increase. There is a range of free plugins that you can find at wordpress.org. Apart from caching the website via plugin a faster way to cache will be to use a server that has got native caching. Like TDWS Managed WordPress has got native NginX WordPress caching. 

We also use a stack of Server caching, WordPress plugin cache, and caching via CDN like CloudFlare. Using this kind of stack we have seen that just by migrating clients from BlueHost to our Hosting platform, we have been able to improve the response time of WordPress from 13s to about 1s. Without trying to optimize WordPress.

This is the CloudFlare Analytics, which shows that 32% of the traffic is cached. Making the website respond faster if the same page is requested by multiple users. 

Too Many Plugins

While plugins are useful in terms of adding features to your website, too many will eat up the server’s resources. Over time, you’ll end up with more plugins than you’ve started with. That means that not only will you end up with plenty of plugins to run, but that some of these them may not be updated, which can slow down the performance of your site even more.

An excessive amount of plugins installed and activated on a WordPress site can be the death of speed. You have to remember that for each plug and you have installed and activated it is likely adding some type of server request when it functions. Each of these requests takes time to complete. The more requests that you have running the slower your website is going to take to render and view for your visitor. Make sure that you are not bloating your website with a large number of active plugins that are not necessary for its success.

Malware

A malware infection site is not only a security threat but also a menace to business. Clearing your site of any malware will ensure that it’s performing at its best. There are several ways to do this. For one, plugins. It’s wise to clean your website of these plugins occasionally, removing ones that you don’t need and updating ones that you require. Your plugin needs may change, but it’s best to keep a WordPress malware removal plugin installed at all times. Such plugins can help you detect intrusions to your site security, making it easier for you to eliminate those threats.

If you find that your website is currently overrun with malware, consider bringing on the help of a WordPress malware removal service. A human touch will do wonders for ensuring your website is performing at its best. On that same note, a fantastic way to improve your site’s loading speed is to choose a hosting provider that offers malware removal services. This ensures that your site isn’t compromised or bogged down with malware stealing server resources.

Final Thoughts 

There are many causes of a slow website. You can start checking for the above factors to figure out what’s causing your site to load forever, then do your best to try and solve it. After all, a slow website is a website that’s just as good as dead. Sluggish WordPress sites are a nuisance. Slow-loading pages impact everything from User experience to SEO. Plus, every second your site’s loading time is delayed, increases the risk of bounced visitors. People are going to be frustrated while trying to use one, so they would most likely never come back again. Try our high performance Managed WordPress Hosting with amazing speed, performance & security that never lets you down.