Stop Website Lag! Unleash the Speed Machine Within Your WordPress Site🌐👩‍🔧⚡
Tags: webdev, wordpress, website, tutorial
Published: 2024-03-23 23:32:02

## TL;DR

- Monitor your site's performance to catch slowdowns early.
- Optimize images for faster loading without sacrificing quality.
- Reduce HTTP requests to streamline communication with visitors' browsers.
- Implement caching to serve content super quickly.
- Fine-tune your database queries for efficient data retrieval.
- Choose a reliable hosting provider for a solid performance foundation.
- Regularly update WordPress plugins for security and performance.
- If issues arise, employ various troubleshooting techniques to point out the problems that need fixing 

## A Brief Introduction

Imagine this: Right after you've got everything set up and ready to go, you deploy your website, ready for the world to see! Soon, potential customers land on your beautifully designed WordPress website. They're excited to explore all the wonderful products and services you have to offer. However, when everything seems pretty unshakable, they encounter a wall of near-endless waiting. Images take forever to load, pages crawl to render, and their excitement gradually fades away. Sooner or later, they leave out of frustration. That's definitely not what we want, right? We're sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but in today's fast-paced world, a slow website is a recipe for lost conversions and frustrated visitors.

The good news? You don't have to settle for sluggish performance. By implementing some key monitoring and troubleshooting techniques, you can transform your website into a speed machine, keeping your business thriving.

In this article, you will learn about various methods for finding buggy problems, fixing them, and keeping your WordPress website running smoothly and unstoppable.


### 1. Monitoring Website Performance
Just as we discussed earlier, a slow website can lead to fraustated visitors, increased bounce rates, low conversions and lower search rankings, monitoring your website's performance is unarguably the foundation to identifying and resolving issues that might be affecting your site's speed and responsiveness.

Several metrics are crucial for monitoring performance. These includes:

- **Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)**: This measures how long it takes for the main content of your website to load fully. In an ideally good condition, your site's LCP should be below 2.5 seconds. It's very important to constantly monitor LCP, as most times visitors' frustration come from slow loading, understanding this metric could help your build more appealing User Experience for your visitors.

- **Total Page Load Time**: Unlike LCP, this parameter measures the overall time it takes to load your entire webpage, aiming for a Total Page Load Time under 3 seconds is required for optimal user experience 

- **Time To First Byte(TTFB)**: This measures the time taken for your browser to receive the first byte from your hosting server. A faster TTFB (which ins generally considered to be nothing more than 200 milliseconds) generally translates to a much quicker site

- **Bounce Rate**: This is the percentage of visitors who leave your website after viewing only one page

- **First Input Delay(FID)**: This metric reflects how responsive your site feels. A low FID (under 100 milliseconds) means users can interact with the page quickly after it loads.

- **Cumulative Layout Shift(CLS)**: This tracks how often elements on your page move around after they've initially loaded. A low CLS score (ideally below 0.1) ensures a stable and frustration-free experience.

**Monitoring Tools**: Numerous free and paid tools are available for you to easily monitor WordPress performance monitoring. Here are some popular options:
- **Google Analytics**: Provides insights into website traffic, user behavior, and bounce rates.
- **Pingdom Website Speed Test**: Offers free website speed tests and reports on page load times and performance bottlenecks.
- **GTmetrix**: Another popular tool for analyzing website performance and providing actionable recommendations for improvement.
- **UptimeRobot**: Monitors website uptime and sends alerts if your website goes down.

Monitoring your site's performance helps to proactively identify or even predict any issues that might affect your visitors user experience, provides data driven insights for optimisation efforts and help to track effectiveness of performance improvements over time.

### 2. Optimising Images
Images are essential for enhancing the visual appeal of your WordPress website, they serve a lot of purpose, allowing visitors have a more detailed view or idea of what you have to offer, thus they always have to be top notch. However, large or unoptimized images can significantly slow down page load times, negatively impacting your website's performance metrics like TTFB and Total Page Load Time. Let's have a look at how image optimization could really help to improve your WordPress site's speed:
- **Impact on Performance**: 
Large image files normally take longer to download, increasing TTFB and page load times. This could essentially lead to higher bounce rates and lower search engine rankings.

- **Optimization Techniques**: Here are some key strategies for optimizing images:

       - **Resize the Image**: When setting images to your site's pages, it's important to make sure they are sized appropriately to the intended display area on your website. WordPress allows you dey default dimensions to automatically resize reloaded images, this makes sure your images are bulkier than needed 
       - **Choosing the right file format**: While the difference between JPEG and PNG images may seem to be insignificant to many, choosing the right image formats plays a key role to enhancing your site's performance.
JPEG images are ideal for photographs with a lot of colors and variations. It uses a compression technique that reduces file size but may introduce some quality loss, on the other hand, PNG images are generally suitable for graphics with sharp lines, text, or transparent backgrounds. Offers lossless compression, but file sizes can be larger compared to JPEG. Choosing between these two formats depends on what type of images you want to present to your customers and how much detail is necessary in these images.
       - **Compress Images**: Utilizing image compression tools or plugins could help further reduce file size without sacrificing too much  visual quality. There are tons of free and paid online services and readily available WordPress plugins like [ShortPixel](https://wordpress.org/plugins/shortpixel-image-optimiser/), [EWWW](https://wordpress.org/plugins/ewww-image-optimizer/), [TinyPNG](), [Optimole](https://wordpress.org/plugins/optimole-wp/), just to name a few,
offer image compression functionality. 
       - **Consider newer formats**: Explore using newer image formats like [WebP](https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/file-types/image/raster/webp-file.html) (WebP is a modern image format that offers significant file size reduction (about 25-35% smaller than JPEG/PNG) for WordPress sites without sacrificing much quality, improving website speed and even SEO.  Plugins like EWWW Image Optimizer can help to handle WebP conversion)and [AVIF](https://www.medianova.com/avif-all-you-need-to-know-about-this-new-image-file-format/) (AVIF, similar to WebP, is an image format offering even better compression (up to 50% smaller than JPEG) for WordPress. This translates to faster loading times and potentially improved SEO. Plugins like AVIF Uploader can help with upload and display, or for more control), which offer superior compression compared to JPEG and PNG while maintaining similar image quality.  However, not all browsers currently support this image file format yet. However, considering this newer file formats could spare you the burden to having to deal with complex compression procedures for traditional image formats.

By implementing, this various image optimisation techniques, your site would benefit from faster loading time, an enhanced user experience and improved search rankings. Overall you could significantly improve your website performance and user experience, without compromising the visual quality of your images

### 3. Minimize HTTP Requests
Every time a visitor accesses your WordPress site, their browser sends multiple requests to the server to download various resources like images, CSS files, JavaScript files, and more. These requests can overtime add up and slow down your website's loading speed as a large number of HTTP requests can overwhelm a server and eventually slow down page load times, this can negatively impact metrics like TTFB and overall page load speed thus leading to frustrated visitors and higher bounce rates in the long run, so, how do we approach such a problem without affecting our site's access to essential and valuable resources?
- **Combine CSS and JavaScript Files**: A lot of WordPress themes and plugins load their own CSS and JavaScript files by default. Combining these files into fewer ones reduces the number of HTTP requests needed to get this files from severs. Many available caching plugins offer this functionality. You can also achieve this manually although this would require knowledge of programming and understanding the plugin on a much technical level.
- **Sprite Images**: If you have several small images used repeatedly throughout your website, consider combining them into a single image sprite. This reduces the number of HTTP requests needed to load these individual images.
- **Font Optimization**: Fonts can also significantly contribute to HTTP requests. Using a service like Google Fonts enables your site load fonts asynchronously, this minimizes their impact on initial page load time.
- **Defer/Async Scripts**: Not all scripts on your website are critical for initial page rendering. Utilize the `defer` or `async` attributes in your HTML code to load non-essential scripts after the initial page load, allowing the main content to render faster. [This article](https://www.w3schools.com/tags/att_script_defer.asp) should help you understand more about how these attributes work.

By reducing the number of HTTP requests, your server can deliver contents faster, improving TTFB and overall page load speed, leading to a smoother browsing experience for users.

### 4. Utilize Caching
When a visitor performs an action on your website, such as signing up for a new service, logging in to their account, or purchasing an item, web requests are made to a web server somewhere in the world. These requests usually don't have a significant impact on your website's speed. However, this isn't always true. Especially for constantly recurring tasks, making frequent web requests to the server can slow down your website over time. That's where caching comes in.

Caching acts like a virtual pantry for your website. It stores frequently accessed elements like web pages, images, and database queries, making them readily available for visitors. This eliminates the need for the server to regenerate them for every request, resulting in a significant boost in website performance.



There are two main types of caching:

- **Browser Caching**: This instructs visitors' browsers to store specific website elements locally. This reduces the number of HTTP requests needed on subsequent visits, further improving performance.
- **Server-side Caching**: This caches website content on the server itself. This ensures all visitors, regardless of location or browser settings, benefit from faster loading times.

Caching comes with many advantages when it comes to enhancing your websites performance, from Faster Page Load Times, to reduced server load.

Popular caching plugins like WP Rocket and WP Super Cache offer user-friendly interfaces to manage various caching options for your WordPress site. Implementing an effective caching strategy can significantly improve website speed and user experience without requiring extensive technical knowledge.

### 5. Optimising Database Queries
A well-optimized database is crucial for a fast WordPress website. Imagine a messy library, searching for a specific book takes longer.  Similarly, complex or inefficient database queries can slow down your website, as your website would have a hard time retrieving information. So, how exactly do you optimize your database for efficiency and smooth workflow?

- **Use indexes effectively**: Indexes act like book catalogs, allowing the database to quickly locate specific data. Strategically implementing indexes on frequently used columns can significantly speed up queries.
- **Minimize SELECT**: Retrieving only the necessary data columns instead of using `SELECT` reduces the amount of data the database needs to process, improving query efficiency.

- **Utilize caching for queries**: Cache frequently executed database queries to avoid redundant processing and improve response times.

### 6. Choosing a Reliable Hosting Provider
Hosting providers are a very important part of your website. They play a very critical role in its performance.

A reliable hosting company offers the infrastructure and resources needed to ensure your website loads quickly and remains accessible to visitors. Conversely, an unreliable hosting provider with slow servers, limited bandwidth, or frequent downtime can significantly hinder your website's speed and user experience.

Here are some key factors to consider when selecting a service host provider:

- **Server Type**: Choose a hosting plan that utilizes SSD storage (this enhances speedy data delivery) and a Content Delivery Network (CDN) for geographical distributed content delivery.

- **Scalability**: Make sure your service provider is reliably able to accommodate traffic spikes or future website growth. To guarantee their scalability, do thorough research on your hosting provider.

- **Uptime Guarantee**: Look for a provider offering a high uptime guarantee (percentage of time your website is online).

Popular Hosting Providers include, [Bluehost](https://www.bluehost.com/), [SiteGround](https://world.siteground.com/), [DreamHost](https://www.dreamhost.com/), [Inmotion Hosting](https://www.inmotionhosting.com/), ex cetera.

Choosing a Reliable Hosting Provider ensures that your website loads quickly and delivers content efficiently, your website can handle any load/number of users thrown at it with degradation, and top security from cyber attacks and malware. 

Overall, investing in a reliable service provider lays the foundation for an optimal website performance and user experience.

### 7. Regularly Update WordPress Plugins
WordPress plugins are a very important part of your website, as they add diverse functionality and features to enrich your site. However, outdated plugins can introduce security vulnerabilities and performance bottlenecks.

Configure your WordPress website to automatically update plugins for minor releases, however it's very important that your backup your site before any major plugin update, this ensures your site's safety especially when newer plugins are faulty or buggy.

Keeping your site's plugins up-to-date helps to avoid security risks (outdated plugins usually contain several unmatched security holes that hackers can exploit), and  performance issues (outdated plugins may not be compatible with newer WordPress versions or other plugins on your website, this leads to several conflicts and slowdowns).

### 8. Troubleshooting Performance Issues

Even with the best practices in place, performance issues can sometimes arise. Utilize various website monitoring tools to pinpoint specific bottlenecks. Metrics like TTFB, page load time and bounce rate can provide valuable clues to issues affecting the efficiency of your WordPress website.

Some key strategies to troubleshooting are:

- **Deactivate Plugins**: Temporarily disable plugins one by one to identify if a specific plugin is causing the slowdown.
- **Switch to Default Theme**: If the issue persists, try switching to a default WordPress theme to isolate if the problem lies with your current theme. 
- **Analyse Server Logs**: Server logs provide detailed information about errors or issues that might be impacting performance.
- **Utilize Debugging Tools**: WordPress offers debugging tools like WP_DEBUG mode to help identify specific errors in your code or theme.

If you're not comfortable or conversant with technical troubleshooting consider seeking assistance from a WordPress Development Community or managed hosting provider.

By following a systematic approach and utilizing the available tools, you can effectively identify and resolve performance issues, keeping your WordPress website running smoothly and efficiently.

## Wrap Up

A fast and responsive WordPress website is essential for user engagement, search engine ranking, and overall success. By following the performance optimization and troubleshooting techniques outlined in this article, you can take control of your website's speed and ensure a positive experience for your visitors.

Remember, website performance is an ongoing process. Regularly monitor key metrics, implement best practices, and stay updated on the latest optimization techniques. By dedicating some time and effort, you can keep your WordPress website running smoothly and efficiently, leaving a lasting impression on your audience.