Why is My WordPress Site So Slow? (5 reasons your website is loading slow)

I’ll walk you through 5 most common reasons your WordPress site is loading so slowly. I will talk you through how you can detect each issue and provide you with links to videos to fix each issue.

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1. WordPress is not caching pages

By far the greatest issue is that your WordPress website is not caching the pages.

A web cache is basically just a way to use temporary storage (caching) for images, code and stuff like that. So when someone visits your website, your browser is able to store some of the files on visitors computer, so that if they visit another page on your site it will load quicker as some of the files needed to build the page are already in visitors browser storage, for example, your website’s logo, which appears probably on all pages.

Now there is also different kind of caching, such as browser cache, which is what I described just now. And server cache, which is basically storing plain HTML files on your server so that it can serve them quicker to your users without the need to go to the database for information that doesn’t change often (like your blog posts).

You can see if you have server & browser cache enabled by using tools like Google Page Speed insights or just using your browser dev tools.

Luckily WordPress has several great plugins for caching, my favorite is W3 Total Cache and a video of how to set it up will appear in the top right corner of your screen, right now.

2. External scripts slow own load time:
The first reason for a slow website is external scripts, such as ads, iframes, and fonts. Usually what makes your website super slow is ads that you show on your website.

This is because your website has to first load all the data of its own, then also load the content and images from the ad provider.

Unfortunately, you cannot cache ads, as they change every time you reload a page.

To combat this, make sure that the script provided with the ads has a tag “async”, which means that the script won’t stop your page from loading, even if it’s not ready yet. If you really want to tackle this, you could also load the external script only after the fool page is loaded, wither on DOM ready or Window on load.

It sounds complicated, but you could wrap your script around this code and it will start loading only after the rest of the website is ready.

3. Web Hosting Has Slow Server Response Time

The second reason for slow page loads is your web hosting, which will have a big impact on the load speed of your website. Especially managed WordPress plans and even shared hosting plans are much slower than dedicated servers.

Obviously, most of you don’t want to invest in a dedicated server, but choosing the right hosting provider is super important. You want a hosting company with good servers which are not overcrowded with websites.

To check this you can run a test in google speed insights or in web tools. Let me show you how.
Slow Server Response Time

4. Page size is too big
The fourth reason is a large page size. And usually, this is because you haven’t compressed and resized your images. Also, it could be that your code is not minimized.

You can check this in Google speed insight…

Also, check that you don’t have unnecessary Page and Post Redirects

To improve this just get a plugin to compress your images when you upload a video of how to do that will appear on your screen now. And also try to see what is the biggest width & height your images have on your website, by resizing your website and right-clicking on it and seeing the image size.

To minimize your code you can use W3 total cache WordPress plugin, that will do it for you as well as it will cache your website. Or just use an online tool like this one here. The link will be in the description.

5. Too many bad plugins
The last reason for slow-loading pages might be simply poorly coded plugins.

You can test this by just disabling all your plugins, except your caching plugin and then running the page speed test again. If you see a big improvement in speed, this means you have a plugin that slowing down your website. You can then enable then one by one, and see which one moves the needle.

If you manage to find a plugin that is slowing your website, see if there is a setting to improve this or then try to find another similar plugin.


Music used in this video:
Big Mojo - Vadodara by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (
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