Some web developers completely dismiss WordPress, claiming it is slow. While this was true in the past, it is no longer an accurate statement. Today, many major brands use WordPress to host their sites.
However, there are many factors that can affect your WordPress site’s performance. Some of the most common are:
- Your site’s web hosting provider
- Server-side optimizations (PHP version, cache, compression, etc.)
- Slow WordPress themes
- Slow WordPress plugins
- Unoptimized content (mainly images)
- Too many external HTTP requests
- Not using a dedicated resource to serve content (CDN, video hosting, etc.)
Aside from the proper server optimizations implemented by your web hosting provider, there are many optimizations you can take care of to ensure your site is super fast. We’ll talk about them later in this post, but first, let’s find out what’s slowing down your site.
4 Steps to Determine if Your WordPress Site is Slow
Step 1: Run Page Load Speed Tests
How fast does your site load? Any web page that takes more than two seconds to load is not good for user experience. Ideally, load times should be under 1 second; anything in between is fine, but you should always aim for better optimization.
There are different website speed check tools you can use for this purpose: GTmetrix, Pingdom Tools, Google PageSpeed Insights, and WebPageTest are good options.
We’ll use GTmetrix and Pingdom tools to demonstrate this step.
First, let’s fire up GTmetrix and test a web page. Choose the server location closest to you (or your site’s visitors) for better results (Tip: sign up for a free GTmetrix account to get more server location options).
Step 2: Website Load Testing
Putting your website through a load test will reveal new information about its real-world speed. For this, we’ll use k6, a free and open-source load testing tool that can be run locally on your system.
Using the free version of k6 requires some command line knowledge, but it’s quite powerful once you get it running. (Note: Alternatively, you can use k6’s premium cloud solution or a simpler cloud-based load testing tool like Loader.io.)
Combined with its fantastic k6 Reporter extension, you can run a load test and get accurate results in HTML.
Step 3: Check Your WordPress Themes and Plugins
Testing your WordPress site’s theme and plugins should be the next important step to uncover any major performance issues. There’s a lot of variety here: you’ll often find that some themes and plugins are better optimized than others.
Earlier, in the speed testing section, we talked about detecting problematic themes or plugins in the reports. But there’s another direct way to do this: deactivate one theme or plugin at a time and see how the site performs (in a speed or load test, or both).
Step 4: Use an Application Performance Monitoring (APM) Tool
An APM tool combined with speed and load testing tools can supercharge your website’s diagnostic capabilities.
Instead of setting up a staging site and guessing which plugin or theme to deactivate one by one, a competent APM tool can help you identify the source of slow performance without changing anything on your site. It tracks and analyzes slow transactions, database queries, external requests, WordPress hooks, plugins, etc.
