Is your WordPress site slow to load? If so, you could be losing customers, visitors, and subscribers. The internet operates at a feverish pace, and if your site can’t keep up, it’s time to make some changes. In this article, we explore five tools for testing your WordPress site’s performance and speed, as well as options to enhance your site’s performance.
Why Is Your WordPress Site Slow?
There are several reasons your site could be performing worse than usual. Loading speeds vary from site to site, but there are a few factors that trip up most sites. For WordPress websites, the most common causes of page loading slow-downs are:
1. Bloated/poorly coded plugins
2. Poorly coded themes
3. Big image files
4. Poor hosting (not suited to your website)
Top Tools to Test WordPress Performance
The following tools will give you a complete picture of how well your website is running. You can use a single tool or use them all in conjunction to cross-reference website data.
1. Google PageSpeed Insights: This nifty web app measures and tests WordPress performance on your site across multiple devices, including desktop and mobile browsers.
2. Pingdom Tools: This free tool gives you full-site performance information, including load time, page size, as well as a detailed analysis of each page on your website. Best of all, this app saves your performance history, so you can track if your efforts to improve loading times are working.
3. GTmetrix: The report that GTmetrix generates will show you a complete history of the website’s loading speeds, as well as a detailed report that suggests ways to improve the performance of your website. Beyond the initial page analysis tools, this web tool also has a video playback feature that enables you to see where the loading speed bottlenecks occur.
4. WebPagetest: This tool gives you your site’s loading speed and a grade breakdown of your site’s performance. It’s unique in that it allows you to select a country to view your report from, so you can see how your site performs across the world. This is useful if you have a large overseas user base.
5. YSlow Browser Plugin: This browser plugin lets you track the performance of any site you’re currently visiting. It doesn’t give you the actual load time, but it does break down over 20 different performance cues. This can help you compare other competitors’ sites within your niche to see how your site stands up.
Options to Enhance Your WordPress Site Performance
Once you have a clear idea of how your site is performing, you can begin to improve it. Here are a few of the most common slow loading page culprits and what you can do to fix them.
1. Specialized Hosting: The cheapest hosting solution is never the best choice for high website performance. Cheaper hosting usually doesn’t have the dedicated bandwidth to cater to every detail of your WordPress site. Shared hosting can still cover all your site’s needs; you just have to do your research first.
2. Consider Uninstalling Certain Plugins: Poorly coded plugins could be slowing down your site. When selecting a plugin, make sure it has a high rating, a large number of downloads and has been updated recently.
3. Drop Your Poorly Coded Theme: Be aware that poorly coded and low-quality themes can drastically affect your site’s performance.
4. Compress & Optimize Images: You can compress and optimize images without losing quality, which will keep your site running fast.
5. Use a Caching Plugin: Since WordPress sites have to make regular database requests, a caching plugin reduces these requests by generating a static HTML page to display instead.
Continued Site Maintenance
If you want your site to remain fast, then you’ll need to maintain it on a regular basis. Continued maintenance on your site includes dealing with comment spam, fixing any broken links and pages, and optimizing your database with a plugin like WP-DBManager.
WordPress Performance Conclusion
Having a high performing website with fast loading speeds will only become more important as time goes on. Luckily, with a suite of free online tools and WordPress plugins, you can test WordPress performance on your site to find the trouble spots and fix them without too much work.
