Why is my WordPress Website so Slow?

Sep 13, 2017 | WordPress Wednesday


Have a slow WordPress site? If you’re running a WordPress website that seems to load too slowly there are certain things that you can do to speed it up! Here are some simple suggestions to improve the load time of your website.


Video Transcript

Hey y’all. It’s another wonderful WordPress Wednesday. My name is Kori Ashton here in San Antonio, Texas and you have found a video on a YouTube channel with over 200 videos on how to improve your WordPress website. So, be sure to check them out.

Today we’re talking about, why is my WordPress website so slow and how do I fix it. I’m gonna give you three ideas of maybe what could be causing the issues with your websites kind of sluggish behavior and I’ll give you some ideas of how to improve those things.

So, I’m gonna give you the first tool as GT metrics. That’s this website right here, and you can go over here and you can just type in your domain name and it’s gonna give you a very quick report. What you want to see are really great scores like this, and you also want to see your load time be maybe three seconds or less.

So, we’re running video on the front side of our website so I think that’s causing some of the issues, but I don’t want to play guessing games here. I want to go down here and kind of see, clicking through these things, and figure out, okay how, what’s causing my issue green obviously is good.  We don’t want to be in the F area right, so how can we improve those things.

If you just open up these little drawers, it’ll start to give you some ideas of how to improve each issue that you’re seeing on your website. A lot of times what you’re gonna see is optimizing images, that’s a big part, so that’s our first thing I want you to be aware of is that you have if you have images on your website you need to be sure they’re optimized smaller for the space that they’re rendering in. So, I’m gonna give you an example what you don’t want to do is if you have an image that’s supposed to be this small in this space and you view the image you want to be sure that it is, in fact, that small. What you don’t want to do is, try to cram a really huge picture down into this tiny space because the browser is still gonna have to load that really huge picture. So, check your images and be sure that they’re optimized.

The next thing you want to do is be sure that you don’t have too many plugins running inside of your dashboard. So, once you jump into plugins area and go over here, now in my own opinion I don’t have this anywhere other than, in my own opinion. I recommend having only no more than a dozen active plugins.  So no more than 12 running on your website and the reason why I say that it’s because you start to see a website really slow down as you add all this additional code and function then you might not even necessarily need, right, so be sure that you’re only running 12 and if you can go ahead and delete anything that you might not be using.  So, clear this out, if they’re inactive.

The other thing you want to be sure of is, if you are using video because video can definitely slow down your website, then it’s optimized really well for fast load time and even better yet maybe it lives on YouTube and just is embedded inside your website so those load really really quickly.

Alright, the last thing I want to share with you is what is a CDN? So, this is the ability that’s really gonna.  You plug this into your website and this thing’s gonna rocket launch the load time of your website. So, I’m gonna put the link to this video that fully explains that in the description box below. I’m gonna give you two other bonus videos as well.  Eight things to do that you must be doing on your website and 8 things to stop doing on your website.

I hope this helps you and helps you improve your load time. If you have questions about your WordPress website, reach out to me. I’ll see you next WordPress Wednesday. Bye ya’ll.