Site speed is one of the most critical aspects of your site because your visitors expect a fast and smooth experience. This guide will cover what factors affect the speed of your website, which tools you can use to measure it, and what actions you can take to improve your site’s speed and performance.
In this guide
These are the most common factors we see that slow down a site:
- Unoptimized Images: High-resolution or unoptimized images can significantly slow down your website.
- Too Many Plugins: Installing too many plugins, especially poorly coded or resource-intensive ones, can slow down your website.
- Outdated plugins: Running outdated versions of themes or plugins can lead to security vulnerabilities and performance issues.
- Inefficient Code: Poorly coded themes or customizations can lead to inefficient code execution, which can slow down your site.
- External Embedded Media: Embedding content from external sources like YouTube or social media can slow down your site, as it relies on external servers.
- External Scripts and Ads: External scripts and third-party ads can introduce additional HTTP requests and slow down your site.
- Large pages: The amount of content on a single page (specifically image and media files) can significantly impact loading time.
The following factors can also typically slow down a WordPress site, but these factors are not applicable to a site hosted on WordPress.com. Here at WordPress.com, we manage the technical aspects of site speed, so you don’t have to.
- Host servers: WordPress.com was named the fastest host of 2022. We optimize our platform to ensure a lightning-fast experience for your website’s visitors.
- Caching mechanisms: WordPress.com sites include caching to serve static content and reduce server load. Plugin-enabled sites can clear the site cache.
- Fast themes: Third-party themes often include extra features that may slow down your site. Choose a WordPress.com theme – all our themes are optimized for speed.
- Content Delivery Network (CDN): A built-in CDN distributes your website’s content across multiple servers worldwide, reducing server load and improving load times for users in different geographic locations.
- High Traffic Loads: WordPress.com includes automated burst scaling to ensure your website will never slow down or crash as a result of heavy traffic spikes or excessive concurrent users.
The best indicator of site performance is how fast it loads in your browser. On average, a website can take up to 4-5 seconds to load in a browser. If you want to speed up your site’s loading time, take the following steps:
The biggest contributing factor to a slow website is the size and number of images added to a single page because large image files take longer to load. It may be tempting to share the highest quality images with your visitors, but often, that can mean the image’s file size is much larger than it needs to be.
You can often safely downsize images significantly without any noticeable impact on quality. To learn more, visit our guide to Optimize your Images.
On plugin-enabled sites, you can use Jetpack Boost to help you identify images on your site that could be optimized.
A site with too many plugins can take longer to load than one with a handful of plugins. This happens because your site processes more code to render the pages your visitors see.
To keep a lean site, use as few plugins as possible. Please note that the following categories of plugins are not necessary for your WordPress.com site as these functions are already included in our hosting services:
- Security & SSL
- Backups
- Caching
- Site speed and optimization
- Database management
- Staging
- Spam protection
- …and more.
It’s a good idea to regularly review your installed plugins and delete the plugins that your site doesn’t need.
Streaming videos and widgets from external services like YouTube, Vimeo, Soundcloud, TripAdvisor, Google AdSense, and Facebook can affect loading times. This is because these parts of your site/content are being pulled in from an external source, and it needs to wait for that service to finish loading before your site’s page is fully loaded.
Although there is an element of waiting there, this time is usually small, with lags being more noticeable on pages with a large amount of embedded material.
While there’s nothing wrong with embedding third-party content from trusted sources, you may wish to remove these if you’re looking for opportunities to speed up load times.
For scripts essential to your site, you can reduce their execution time with the “Defer Non-Essential JavaScript” setting in the Jetpack Boost plugin. This plugin can also help you concatenate JavaScript on your website to further improve how quickly browsers load your site.
Your website’s appearance is styled by a language called CSS. CSS files can be quite large, and even larger thanks to plugins that include additional CSS. This means that a web browser has to process a large amount of information to display your content.
The Jetpack Boost plugin can help you optimize how CSS is loaded. It includes one-click settings to move critical CSS information to the start of the page (helping pages display your content sooner) and concatenating CSS to reduce site loading time and reduce the number of requests.
The theme you choose controls the layout and design of your site. A plugin-enabled WordPress.com plan allows you to upload any theme from any creator, not just from our collection of speedy WordPress.com themes. This gives you many more options from thousands of themes, but consider that other themes may not be developed with speed in mind.
When choosing a theme, you’ll see each theme’s reviews, the number of active installs, the last update, and compatibility. These are important to consider when choosing an efficient theme.
Some of the most amazing-looking themes can cause poor site speed if they are over-packed with extra features. Therefore, we recommend being cautious when choosing your theme and considering themes containing only the features you need.
Outdated plugins and themes can make your site fall behind the latest optimization techniques. Always keep your plugins and themes up to date to ensure your site can load efficiently.
Over time, a WordPress database can become bloated with unnecessary data. Regularly clean up your database by deleting spam comments and unused plugins.
There are several different site speed measuring tools you can find on the web, including:
These automated site performance tools give general recommendations. In addition, they help identify some best practices and opportunities for increased site speed.
However, these tools often don’t consider specific software platforms, like WordPress.com, or tools required to keep your site looking and running well. While they can offer insight into site performance, a lot of the issues they highlight do not apply to a WordPress.com website. Ultimately, if you followed all of these tools’ rigorous rule-checking, you would have a blank site with just raw text because that loads the fastest.
WordPress.com is optimized for speed and performance, and our support staff cannot assist with reports from these measurement tools. We encourage you to consult the information in this guide which covers the main things a website owner can do to ensure a fast-loading website.