Slow loading websites can have a major impact on your visitors experience as well as your ranking. Not only that, it’s long been known that Google considers page load speed as one of it ranking factors.

If you are using WordPress you will probably know there are a wealth of plugins and themes to choose from. Its one of the reasons why we at Outsprung use the platform for most of our projects. The flexibility of WordPress can also be it’s own worst enemy and can be a direct factor on the speed of your website.

We have worked with many clients to improve their website speeds and typically we find the same 3 factors contributing to their website loading too slow.

Plugins

WordPress is an open source platform and because of this anyone, no matter what their level of programming might be, can create a plugin and release it into the wordpress repository. As you can imagine not everyone’s programming knowledge is equal and it’s the simple truth that some plugins are coded better than others.

WordPress does have a ‘best practices’ guideline that all developers are advised to stick to but unfortunately these practices are often ignored. A good rule of thumb is to stick to plugins that are established with good support and regular updates and by the wordpress user rating.

Choose plugins with these criteria and you’ll likely stay clear of any poorly coded plugins. You should also not let your guard down with when using premium plugins either. Many of these plugins are poorly coded and ignore the best practices. Always be read the reviews in detail.

Themes

Pretty much all of above can be applied to WordPress themes as well. WordPress theme developers are now optimizing their themes so they perform faster and you’ll notice a lot of themes now claim blistering page load speed, like we see in the Royal WordPress Theme below.

While this is always a good feature to look out for in themes it is worth noting that you probably won’t get these speeds if you are using a shared hosting account (more on that in a bit).

A few excellent resources to help you find a fast loading theme are:

• http://www.wpspeedster.com/
• https://colorlib.com/wp/fast-loading-wordpress-themes/

Hosting

As I mentioned above, your theme is only going to be as good as your hosting provider. If you are having more than 100+ visitors per day then I’d suggest going for a premium hosting provider. Many of the cheap hosters are cheap for a reason…..their servers are often oversold and and under resourced.

Shared hosting is the most common form of hosting, its called shared hoting because it’s just that. Many websites sharing one server. While this may work if all website are equal in their resource consumption, it can often lead to dreadful performance when one or more websites use more than their share of the resources.

There have been numerous studies on response times from some of the most popular providers. Bluehost and Hostgator, who I have both used and can confirm the poor quality, always come out worst in the tests. We usually recommend Siteground or StableHost as our preferred choice for clients. It’s easy to see why from the chart below.

If you have a high traffic website then a VPS or dedicated server is the best option and you get set a dedicated percentage (if not all in the dedicated case) of the CPU and RAM.

A good benchmark to test your hosting is to do a page speed test with the native themes of wordpress such as twenty fifteen/fouteen/thriteen. If you have slow page load speeds with those themes then don’t expect to get much higher with other themes.

If you experience continuous poor load times get in touch with your hosting provider support team. They might be able to resolve some of the issues for you. If you don’t see an improvement then it might be time to think about migrating to better provider.

Generally you want to stay away from any hosting company that is owned by EIG. Pretty much every hosting company that has been bought by them has suffered terrible performance and customer service issues.

Years ago I was hosting with HostGator and they were great, then they got bought out by EIG and turned to crap. Same thing happened recently with Arvixe (who Outsprung were previously hosted with). There was huge amounts of downtime for Arvixe customers because of the migration to EIG servers. Because of the fiasco we moved over to StableHost. Let’s hope they don’t get bought out too!

You can see a full list of hosting companies that are owned by EIG here.

There are lot’s of different reason as to why your website may be running slow. Listed above are just a few, if you are having speed issues think about hiring someone to investigate and fix these issues as they can be a huge hindrance to your online business. As ever, if you want any help with anything talked about today just send me a message.