Wordpress Slow Loading

There are several reasons why a WordPress site loads slow. The most basic reason that everyone must understand is that WordPress is a CMS (content management system). Though CMS allows users/designers/developers to create contents on a page (with or without page builders) without coding knowledge, the contents created are saved to a database, which they can modify eventually. These saved content are referred to as “dynamic content” of a page.

Serving dynamic contents to a users browser entails more processing time as compared to serving static contents. It’s like eating at a casual/fine dining wherein the food will only be prepared after you’ve ordered it. Whereas serving static contents is like eating at a fastfood wherein the food is immediatley available.

CMS-driven sites serves dynamic contents: the back-end script (PHP) connects to a separate database; fetches relevant dynamic content from that database; constructs full HTML response out of the fetched content, and; sends it to the visitor’s browser. In short, dynamic sites are basically slower than static sites. It’s a fact, and you will have to live with it.

So much for the basic reason. Let’s dive in to the other reasons and here are the most common:

Low Quality Hosting
Shared Hosting
Unoptimized images/photos used on the pages.
Plugins:
- Developer installed too many plugins and/or used “bulky do-it-all” plugins.
- Outdated plugins
- No caching plugin installed.

Let’s go thru each one of these in detail:

Low Quality Hosting

Forget about cheap hosting. They would only make your site suffer with frequent downtimes, less protection (to DDOS attacks and other attacks), squeezing so much websites on one server, overloaded bandwidth that cannot serve pages well on any given traffic situation.

Shared Hosting

Cheap hosting are usually focused more on shared hosting even if they provide other hosting options. So, they’re one and the same most of the time. Shared hosting means there are several websites housed on a server utilizing common resources like hard drives, memory, common IP, a shared bandwidth among others. Hosts usually tend to squeeze more websites in as much as they can for profitable gain giving less care on overload. Avoid it.

Unoptimized images/photos used on the pages

WordPress inherently creates different versions (large, medium, thumbnail versions) of uploaded images, apart from the original size. Some themes on CMS, especially those with built-in page builders allows you to choose which versions you want displayed. If your theme doesn’t support that, then you could end up displaying the original version of your image. What if the original version is 2mb (or higher) size? That could take a lot of time to load, thus, affecting the performance of your site. Worst if there are several original images with high filesize that needs to be loaded.

Plugins

Developer installed too many plugins and/or used “bulky do-it-all” plugins

Plugins allows extension of the CMS functionality. It’s really helpful. However, some plugin creators partners with other plugin creators to make their plugins do more. That’s good. But most often, the result of “äll-in-one” plugins yields negative effects. Imagine loading some plugins even if you don’t need it. An option to disable those you don’t need still eats up entry on your database, not to mention disk space. Mind you, hosting space doesn’t scale down, it always scales up.

Developers tend to install too much plugins even if not really necessary. Again, this eats up entry on your database, not to mention disk space.

Outdated plugins

Plugins are helpful. But it could get create problems if those plugins are unmaintained by their creators, it could pose a threat to security, not to mention compatibility to CMS version.

No caching plugins installed

Caching plugins are great – it creates static versions of your dynamic pages. These static versions are the ones served to your visitors instead of the dynamic contents. The result is that your web pages will load faster.

Bottom Line

CMS-driven sites are great. It make things easier for both the site owners and developers. It allows site owners maintain the site themselves provided they’ve been trained to use the CMS and the theme that was used on the site. CMS also allows developers to focus more on designing, less on programming.

However, CMS-driven websites are slower in performance, so you will have to take note on the issues already mentioned above.

On our next blog, we’ll tackle solutions on how you can improve your WordPress site’s loading issues.