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.
What Makes a Website Slow
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- Outdated plugins: Running outdated versions of themes or plugins can lead to security vulnerabilities and performance issues.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.
How We Optimize Your Site
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 is an optimized hosting 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. The CDN also serves images in WebP format for size reductions of up to 34% without any loss of quality, ensuring speedy image load times.
- 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.
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