Speed Up Your WordPress Website

Aug 21, 2019 | WordPress Wednesday

Do you have a slow loading WordPress website? Speed up your WordPress website with a few easy ideas that Kori Ashton will share with you. The standard load time should be less than 3 seconds.

Full Transcript:

Hey everyone. My name is Kori Ashton and this is another WordPress Wednesday brought to you by Liquid Web. They are the absolute, most helpful people in hosting, especially in the world of WordPress. If you’re up against a brick wall, you’re trying to figure out something really difficult inside the world of WordPress, be sure to reach out to them. They’re an amazing hosting company that offers that added support that you’re probably looking for.

All right, let’s get to the tutorial. The question is, why is my WordPress website so slow? It takes so long to load. What could it possibly be? I’m gonna give you a couple of different ideas today that you can troubleshoot, to maybe figure out and fix that problem right now.

Those of you interested in my health journey, please stick around to the end of this. I’ll give you a quick update.

Site speed Tester – GTmetrics

But for those of you who watch my channel, you know I’ve used this tool many times before, GTmetrics.com, the free tool as of today. If you come over here and just type in your URL and see what your page load speed is, right? There’s a couple of different tools online you can do this with. I like this one, pretty simple, pretty straightforward. Just type in your website address, and click Test my Site. And it will pull it up right there and give you a very quick overview of how your website responds to the browser. And this gives you an idea, very quickly, of how many files that your website if requiring the browser to go render, to go look for on your server and pull, in order to make your website look beautiful. You want to have, of course, an A report here. You want your letter grade to be an A or higher, and by that I mean an A+.

You wanna understand why, your Why Slow score is a C or less, and I’ll show you that here in a second. You certainly want your website to load in three seconds or less. The faster, the better. And typically you get that at a lower score if your requests over here are fewer. So you just wanna have as limited requests as possible. You can do this to any website out there. You can go test your competitor’s website. It doesn’t matter. You can do whatever you’d like to do here. Now, this is also testing from servers in Canada. And I am sitting here in, of course, Texas. So that might also impact the speed.

Using Chrome desktop and it also is mentioning that fact that it is a WordPress website that it’s listing. If you wanted to sign up for an account with GTmetrics, you can also apply CDN if you have that available, and that will improve all of these tests that you’re running. So if you’re a developer or if you’re a freelancer, and you’re looking to submit these reports to your clients whenever you’re launching your new website, you might want to do that. Just go ahead and sign up, and create an account so that you can add that CDN and improve your scores across the board.

So scrolling down here, it’s gonna tell you basically why you scored what you scored. It’s gonna tell you that you should be leveraging your browser caching, right? So again, that’s your CDN. If you open up these little drawers, it will give you a little bit more feedback, and let you click on What Does This Mean? And it will give you more explanations so that you’re not completely clueless.

You’re gonna see the things you are doing correctly, and then as you scroll down, you’ll see the things you might not be doing correctly, right? So if we toggle over to the Why Slow, we’re gonna get Fs on a couple of these different things. Why? Open this up and see why. They’re going to tell you exactly what’s going on, okay? So don’t just take my word for it. Type in your web address. Get over here and see what’s happening.

It could be a few things going on inside your website. It could be the theme itself that is so bloated that it’s just super, super slow. So you can troubleshoot by changing your theme really quickly, and then running it through GTmetrics, and see if that improves things.

Hosting Company Slowing You Down?

It could be your hosting company, believe it or not. If you ave paid really, really cheap, cheap hosting, and you’re on this massively bloated shared server, then everything’s gonna be really sluggish. You wanna be on a great server with good security that loads quickly. So be sure to look for a solution like that with Liquid Web, and I’ll give you a coupon code in the description box below so that you can get better hosting services.

Too Many Plugins?

It could be that you’re running way too many plugins. I always recommend 12 or fewer plugins. Now that’s just my own personal opinion. That’s not some rule somewhere. Normally when we build websites here at WebTegrity, we’re launching them with five or fewer plugins. So you always wanna be running just as minimal as possible, so that those requests that we saw going to the server are few as possible, right?

Have CDN?

You also can add a CDN, or a content delivery network, that increases your speed and helps you load things much more quickly, and leveraging that caching issue that we saw. So be sure to look at adding a CDN. And some hosting companies give you one of those for free included in your hosting package. So ask Liquid Web if you can get one of those included.

Large Images or Videos

It could really be a plethora of things. It can even be something as, maybe your images or your videos on your website are too large, and they’re taking way to long to load, and they’re frustrating your end user. So be sure to check each one of those things, and the best way to do that, again, is using that free tool GTmetrics.

Go over there, type in your domain name, click Test my Site, and see what that report gives you.

Hey, I hope this helps you. I’ve got a couple of other videos in the description box below if you wanna learn more about this. I go into a little more depth on what is a CDN, how to improve your website’s load time, and speed up things. I’ll put that in the description box below.

And if you like videos like this, check me out every single week. Be sure to click the bell and subscribe, ’cause I’m doing a video like this every week for you on WordPress Wednesday, so you can improve your online marketing inside the world of WordPress.

I hope you all are having a great one. I’ll see ya next week. Bye y’all. Hey everyone. Thanks for sticking around, if you’re interested in my health journey.

Other Resources

Health Update

I was diagnosed on July 1st with cervical cancer. And I have been in the struggle to survive this over the last month or so, now moving into August here. I am on radiation/chemo treatment. And the best treatment possible though is y’all with all your love and all your support and all your comments and twitter messages and your emails and just such kind support coming from the WordPress community, literally around the world. Thank you so much for your encouragement.

This week I am halfway through all of my treatments, and moving on into potentially having internal radiation done, not just the external that I’ve been having done. So please keep me in your prayers, keep me in your thoughts as I move into that. I have been told it’s quite painful. We will see. Right now the only side effects that I’m really experiencing at this point has been fatigue. I’m like ready to take a nap right now, to be honest with you. Fatigue and a little bit of nausea as I experience chemo as well.

So y’all I’m so excited about the day, and I know it’s coming soon, that I’m gonna be able to tell you I’m in remission. I’m excited about the day that I’m gonna be able to say that I am no longer battling cancer, but that I am in fact a cancer survivor. And I know with your prayers, your support, your uplifting thoughts and all your kind comments to me, that’s gonna get me even one step closer.

So I hope y’all are having a great one. Again thank you so much for all the encouragement, all of the love, all the support. I’ll see y’all next time online. Bye everyone.