Why is Your WordPress Blog Extremely Slow?

Updated on July 2nd, 2018 by Quertime Team in WordPress

WordPress is one of the most popular blogging platforms used by millions of bloggers worldwide. While it’s free, easy to use and equipped with tons of awesome features from plug-in architecture to template system, the CMS (content management system) sometimes has some common issues that make your blog slow.

When a visitor reaches your WordPress blog, the server processes PHP scripts and establishes a database connection. The higher traffic your blog receives, the slower this process becomes. However not all slow page loads are caused by web traffic, here are 2 common causes of the problem and our recommendations to fix them in minutes!

Misbehaving Plugins
One of the possible causes that make your site loading slow is problematic plug-in you’ve installed. We suggest you disable all of your plugins and enable them individually to find out the one that causes the slowing.

Using Images that are Hosted on Other Servers
Replace links to external images with images uploaded to your WordPress site.

5 Tools to Find out the Reasons of Your Site Slowness
If you still can’t fix the problem, below we’ve recommended 5 tools you can use to determine the causes that make your site slow. The problem can be on your server side, web browser or both reasons combined.

WebPageTest
WebPageTest runs a free website speed test from multiple locations around the globe using real browsers (Internet Explorer and Chrome) and at real consumer connection speeds.

Google Page Speed Insights
This Google tool analyzes the content of your web page, then generates report with suggestions that make your page load faster. It helps to reduce page load times so that both bounce rates and conversion rates can be improved.

Yahoo! YSlow
YSlow analyzes your website and suggests ways to improve its performance based on a set of rules for high performance web pages.

Pingdom Tools
This is a popular online tool you can use to test the load time of your web page. All you have to do is enter a URL to test the load time of that page, analyze it and find bottlenecks.

lori (Life-of-request info) – Firefox Plugin
This Firefox plugin tells you how long it takes to load a page. It’s useful for optimizing a website or blog.

Install WordPress Plugins to Improve Your Page Load Time
If your WordPress blog doesn’t have any slow load time issues, you should further improve the speed by installing one of the plugins listed below:-

WP Super Cache
WP Super Cache generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog, your webserver will then serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.

W3 Total Cache
This plugin improves your server performance, caching every aspect of your site, reducing the download times and providing transparent content delivery network (CDN) integration.

WP-DBManager
This plugin lets you to optimize database, repair database, backup database, restore database, etc. It also supports automatic scheduling of backing up, optimizing and repairing of database.

Performance Profiler Plugin
This plugin creates a profile of your WordPress site’s plugins’ performance by measuring their impact on your site’s load time.

(Image Source: Flynewmedia.com)