Installing a ton of plugins to make your WordPress blog more functional is very tempting, but if you add too many plugins, especially plugins that have been poorly coded or are out of date, it can have a detrimental effect on the user experience.
Ideally a webpage should load within two seconds, but this is near on impossible for many WordPress blogs on shared hosting, which is what many blog owners use.
The problem stems from the dynamic nature of WordPress and the often overcrowded shared hosting environment.
WordPress creates its pages on the fly. This can result in high usage of server resources. If there are lots of plugins installed that also have to query the database and output results (alongside WordPress), this impacts further on servers ability to deliver pages quickly and therefore decreases the speed a page can load.
The more plugins you have, the harder the server has to work and in turn the longer the blog visitor has to wait for the page to load. Couple this with an already busy server and you have a slow loading, user unfriendly blog.
What can you do about a slow loading WordPress blog?
- The first choice for many people is the WP Super Cache plugin. It creates static HTML versions of your dynamic pages. This massively reduces the numbers of queries made to the database and helps to increase page load time.
- Go through all of your plugins and deactivate the ones you don’t need. Be ruthless. Get rid of the vanity plugins first, but active keep essential plugins such as Akismet. You definitely want to keep Akismet blocking comment spam.
- Make sure you are using the latest version of WordPress. These days you can automatically update from the admin area, but make sure you back up the blog database and files before you do.
- Make sure you are using the latest versions of the plugins you use.
- Speak to your webhost to see if they can make any changes to the configuration of the server.
Do you have any other suggestions for increasing the download speed of a slow loading WordPress blog? Please share them in the comments section.
I hope you enjoyed this post and found it useful. If so, please consider tweeting it or sharing it in another way.
Subscribe to the RSS feed
This site uses KeywordLuv. Enter YourName@YourKeywords in the Name field to take advantage.