WordPress Website Loading Very Slow | How to Resolve

If you are a WordPress user, you can see the vast digital landscape it provides for the user to create a highly effective brand reputation and an engaging online presence, eventually helping them increase their revenues consistently and help build a huge community of loyal customers in the long run. In this fast-paced atmosphere, a slow-loading website might act as a huge hindrance in delivering high-quality services and products to the customer and might become a significant deterrent to the brand reputation.

In this blog, we will cover the Error of WordPress site too Slow and Fix and common issues triggering a slow-loading WordPress website, how to resolve a slow WordPress Admin dashboard, and some of the major conflicting performance issues to bring out the peak-performing WordPress website through the process of optimizing and setting up the appropriate and high-performance environment to maximize your brand online performance.

Disadvantages of a slow WordPress Website:

A slow WordPress website can have multiple negative consequences, ultimately affecting the overall online presence and brand reputation impacting the revenue and sales generated on the website. Here are some of the disadvantages of a slow-loading WordPress Website that can potentially deter the user experience.  

• Poor User Experience: User experience concerning a website plays an important role in boosting traffic on the website. A poorly-loading website can significantly impact the user experience which can lead to frustration, a perceived bad image of the organization, difficulties faced in Navigation and loading content, and a higher likelihood of never visiting your website again. A poor user experience can also lead to lower engagement on the website which likely generates lesser traffic.
• Reduced Conversions: Types of conversions such as making a purchase, filling out a form, or user signing up bring up higher engagement on the website. A slow-loading website can create obstructions in carrying out these actions effectively leading to incomplete transactions, sign-ups, and downloads and eventually leading to a decrease in conversion rates of up to 7% (Source: Amazon Web Services). This can lead to an advantage for other competitors in the market and ruin an overall brand reputation.
• Lower Search Engine Rankings: Search engines such as Google, Bing, and Edge prefer and prioritize the websites that are fast-loading and are relevant to the user’s searched keywords. A slow-loading website can certainly be not picked up in the search engine result pages (SERPs)  leading to a decrease in the higher rankings on the search results. This will significantly impact the number of users visiting your website leading to lower engagement rates. 
• Higher Abandonment Rates: When a user tries to engage on a website such as making a transaction, signing up for a newsletter subscription, or downloading a document, the speed and performance of the website play an important role in helping the user complete their desired actions efficiently. A slow-loading website can lead the user to be impatient and eventually leave the website without completing the intended actions generating a large abandonment rate and ruining the overall user experience and the brand reputation.
• Reduced Revenues: Abandoned shopping carts or transaction pages can lead to a loss in sales revenue and reduced conversions such as user sign-ups, form submissions, and product purchases. Slow-loading e-commerce websites could potentially contribute to lower AOV (Average Order Value) as users will be less likely to complete a transaction or a purchase efficiently and would pass on bad experiences online.
• Increased Bounce Rates: Bounce rates are the percentage of websites where the user leaves the website right after visiting, without making any transactions or engaging in the other pages of the website. A slow-loading website may contribute to an increase in the percentage of the bounce rates relatively impacting the user experience and wasted marketing efforts. This will lead to a domino effect contributing to lower SERP ranking, reduced website conversions, and damage to organizational reputation.
• Negative Impact on Brand Reputation: A slow-loading website may contribute to creating a bad image of the brand as being outdated, unprofessional, and lacking in technical expertise. It can be perceived as a website with security issues leading to lower engagement rates and increased percentage of bounce rates. A slow-loading website will certainly bring up trust issues between the customer and the brand, contributing to a decrease in the number of loyal customers and eroding the vision of the brand’s ability to deliver high-quality services or products.

Common Causes of Slow Performance of WordPress Website

We can see and identify several common causes attributed to the slow performance and speed of the WordPress website. Common issues such as outdated images and plugins, clashed cache plugins, and inconsistent or insufficient server resources can result in a ripple effect on the overall user experience coupled with security risks and negative brand image in the market bringing up a competitive advantage to other brands.

Poorly Optimized Images

Image optimization for SEO is an important part for maintaining your to the date and properly optimized. Using high-resolution media that are not in use on the website, uncompressed, large file-sized images can impact the overall performance of the website. Using the incorrect file formats for images and video, and failing to include accessibility and SEO-friendly content also generate poorly optimized website experience for the user. This can lead to an increase in page loading time, poor user experience, and a decrease in the search engine rankings on the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages).

Excessive Plugins

Excessive plugins give rise to Code congestion, leading to numerous plugin errors and bugs that impact the overall performance of the website. It also generates server load as more plugins expect even more server resources to keep running which could be fatal for the website to load efficiently. Outdated plugins also lead to security risks which are prone to malicious cyber attacks and online threats. It can also contribute to providing unauthorized access to unknown resources which debilitates the overall safety of the website.

Insufficient, outdated WordPress themes

Outdated themes are generally not optimized or updated for a longer time, leading to slow generation of the pages of the website and an increase in loading times. Poorly coded themes also lead to a range of errors and bugs impacting the performance of the website and give rise to difficulties in updating the WordPress website.

Insufficient Server Resources

Inadequate disk space, poor bandwidth, insufficient RAM, or a slow CPU majorly trigger the WordPress website to slow down and eventually lead to fatal crashes during higher traffic rates or spikes. Frequent error messages and websites being unresponsive and frequently down are some of the impacts of insufficient server resources. A poor WordPress database can also generate a significant amount of errors on the website impacting overall website performance.

Caching Issues

Cache conflicts such as insufficient cache date clearance, wrong cache settings, or expired or inactive cache generate higher risks in slowing down the speed and performance of the WordPress website. Clear your WordPress cache after major theme or plugin updates, clashes between multiple caching plugins, or caching too much data can trigger inconsistent WordPress website behaviors indicating the poor performance of the website.

Types of Issues Causing Slow Performance of WordPress Website and its Resolution:

Here are some of the significant issues and causes that hinder the speed and performance of the WordPress website and impede the user from using the website to its full potential.

You can leverage this guide to learn how to speed up WordPress site loading times and go through the WordPress slow loading issues and solutions by fixing Slow WordPress loading times.

Using Low-quality Website Hosting

Website Hosting helps you make your website accessible online on the internet by providing the server to store website data, files, and content which is connected to the internet. Using a low-quality can significantly trigger security risks, bring up poor server response time, and impact the reputation of the technical expertise backing up the specific organization.

There are a lot of performance and security benefits to using high-quality website hosting for your website which caters to a variety of robust resources such as proactive monitoring and server maintenance, website management, security and optimization, and secured data transmission.

High-quality WordPress website hosting services such as Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services, WP Alpha, etc. provide you with reliable speed, performance, and uptime along with security, scalability, and flexibility. This can help you with WordPress Performance Optimization and fix Slow WordPress Sites.

Excessive Plugins

When you are facing longer loading times, a higher percentage of website rates, and poor SERP rankings, it can be the cause of excessive plugins running on your website. 

Plugins are the software elements that perform a specific functionality on your WordPress website. They help you enhance the website's performance. Excessive plugins hamper the performance of the website by over-consuming the server resources, adding their individual codes and HTTP requests to external which increase the aggregated memory of the files of your website.

You can maintain an updated inventory for your plugins by reviewing the same in routine, deactivating or deleting outdated or unused plugins, using better alternatives for your resource-intensive plugins, and optimizing plugin settings to reduce the number of additional HTTP requests and database queries can help to boost the traffic and help achieve absolute seamless performance. This will allow you to optimize WordPress for faster loading.

Failure to utilize Caching

By serving cached versions of your website, the user can experience faster load times and reduced server loads on the website leading to improvised SEO and SERP rankings. Without caching, WordPress websites can experience major server load, resulting in downtime, slower website performance, and challenges to deal with the increased traffic for a certain period of time.

Common mistakes such as not maintaining a regular cache clearance routine, failing to configure appropriate cache settings, and not using cache plugins can generate immense amounts of server load and database errors reducing scalability and peak performance.

One can follow better practices by choosing a reputable caching plugin such as W3 Total Cache, WP Rocket, and WP Super Cache. One can also configure the cache settings correctly by contributing to regular cache clearances, setting up cache expiration times to regular updates, and monitoring cache performances in a timely manner.

Failure to use Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Not choosing a reliable CDN (Content Delivery Network) for your website, not taking the location of the user and the server origin into consideration, and failing to optimize static content such as images and videos can lead to slower page loading and penalize the overall search engine rankings of the website. 

CDN is a distributed server network across different geographical locations. It helps in delivering and caching the static content of the website such as CSS files, images, videos, and JavaScript files to the user by using the nearest server present to the user. I f you setup WordPress CDN it will can help you reduce the distance between website resources and users leading to faster page loads and increased conversion rates.

The usage of CDN helps in reducing server load by offloading static content from the server and thus improving the server performance. It also ensures minimizing downtime and providing high availability by offering redundant servers and networks.

Improperly configured database and outdated PHP versions

Unoptimized database setup and queries affect the comprehensive performance of the website as the database takes a longer time to load and process the files after retrieval of data. Fragmented data over time can also lead to slow page loads impacting the bounce rate and SERP rankings of the website. 

Outdated PHP versions also bring out vulnerabilities with respect to security and increase the risks of malicious attacks leading to security breaches and compatibility issues. 

Using a reliable Web Host and regularly optimizing and maintaining the database can lead to boost performance and bring efficiency to the website. Keeping the PHP version updated to ensure the latest performance enhancements and mitigation of online threats and malware attacks by introducing security patches and updates helps address security breaching issues effectively. One can also monitor website performance to identify and resolve database issues and errors in a timely manner to avoid fatal crashes and conflicts arising on the website.

How to speed up WordPress site loading Times and optimize WordPress for faster loading

One can follow multiple optimization techniques and strategize theme and plugin management along with Security and Maintenance to boost the holistic ecosystem of the website aiding the user to have an entire seamless experience.

Here are some of the easy WordPress Optimization Techniques that fix WordPress's slow loading and optimize the WordPress database for faster loading.

Routine Updates and Backups

Ensure there are regulated updates and backups running throughout the entire website with the latest version of WordPress. One can use trustworthy backup plugins like VaultPress, Duplicator, etc. to back up your website.

Iis very complicated to backing up your website manually. backing up each and every folder and data is extremely important, If a single file is missing it can create an immense loss of data. That's why users prefer to use backup plugins on their website. If you are looking for one then do visit our blog on "best WordPress backup plugins"

Security checks

Enabling two-factor authentication adds an extra layer of safety and security with 2FA plugins like Google Authenticator or Authy, monitoring the website for any malware practices or online threats and resolving the issue about the same can help your website mitigate the risks of online vulnerability. You can also use top WordPress captcha plugins and enable a two factor authentication on you r website.

Database Maintenance

Optimizing the database and timely carrying out advanced database cleaning to remove unnecessary and compromising data from the website can boost the cumulative performance of the website, at the architectural level. Checking for database errors by identifying and resolving them to debilitate the risk of data corruption.

Performance Optimization

Performance Optimization is important to avoid higher bounce rates, lower search engine rankings, and reduced conversion rates. To make sure the website works on the optimized performance level, doing regular caching clearance, optimizing database queries and structure, configuring server settings, resolving the issues pertaining to the server and much more can improve the performance and iterate the efficiency across the website.

Conclusion

By implementing the actionable tips and solutions that can help you resolve the conflicting WordPress website issues, you can potentially improve and upgrade your website’s performance, help enhance the user experience, and drive more engagement and revenue for your brand. This blog will help you with WordPress slow loading issues and solutions for fixing WordPress Slow loading times for WordPress Site Speed optimization.

One cannot ignore the fact that a high-performing website is not an optional choice, but a necessity to elevate the online presence and reputation of the brand and boost engagement and increase the traffic on your website. VW themes provide you with a diverse range of peak-performing Premium WordPress themes coupled with extensive plugin options to boost productivity that can help create a cutting-edge website to help lead in this digital competitive market.