“Why is my website so slow?” is one of the most frequent complaints I hear about WordPress. It’s crazy how the tool itself is taking the blame for bad choices done by whoever built the website.
Every day on freelancing platforms I see an endless list of projects that ask for help on this apparently eternal problem: “I need to speed up my website.”
And of course, everyone who owns a website (especially if this website generates revenue) wants a fast website. Your revenue is correlated to your site load speed, in a non-linear way.
For every 100-millisecond your website takes to load, conversions can drop by 7 percent. And you can easily lose 53% of your mobile traffic if your site takes more than 3 seconds to load.
Source: SOASTA, The State of Online Retail Performance, 2017 (now you can find this study on Akamai.com)
The good news: WordPress itself isn’t really “slow”. It can be a relatively fast CMS.
The bad news: due to the highly customizable nature of WordPress, you have to make several decisions whenever you need to build a website, or when you need to add a new feature. And since you are free to decide between endless options, it’s easy to make mistakes if you’re not an expert. That freedom that easily allows you to add new features that otherwise would cost you thousands of dollars in development can also compromise your website.
You can choose between several tools, and the real challenge is choosing the right tool for the right job.
If you repeatedly choose the wrong tools, you will end up with a slow and bloated website.
Since this topic is complex, one single post isn’t enough. So I wrote a mini-series of guides. Each guide is dedicated to one specific problem that may cause you performance problems.
The goal of this series is to help you make better decisions so your WordPress website will not slow down your business 🙂
In order of priority:
- Bad hosting service or server configuration. How to choose the best hosting service for your WordPress website?
- Bad themes. How to choose the right WordPress theme?
- Bad plugins. How to choose the right set of plugins?
- Hiring the wrong developer. How to choose a developer if you’re non-technical?
- More guides on the topic coming soon. Feel free to reach out to me via this website or on LinkedIn if you have questions. Your feedback can help me to create interesting guides for this and other topics.