Is Your WordPress Blog Slower Than You Think? (And How to Fix It)

by Devesh Sharma

on

Infuriating, isn’t it?

When a site loads so slowly you want to throw your computer out of the window.

Entire seconds pass before anything at all appears in your browser, and you start to wonder if the site even exists!

When it does respond, watching the site appear piece by piece is like a form of torture.

And by the time it finally loads, you’re so frustrated with the whole experience that you’re half-tempted to click away without reading any of the content.

After all, what self-respecting blogger would allow his or her blog to perform like this?

But before you climb on your high horse, ask yourself this question:

What if this is exactly how other people feel about your blog?

That’s right, your blog.

You’d feel mortified, right? The owner of the slowest blog on the block.

But better to find out sooner rather than later so you can fix it if necessary.

Let’s find out how . . .

The Psychological Effects of a Slow-Loading Website

Have you ever called a customer service line and sat in the queue for ages? You waited around, tapping your fingers on the desk, as minutes of your precious time flew by.

As time passed, you probably forgot why you called in, and the only thing you could concentrate on was your rising frustration. By the time someone finally picked up your call, you weren’t grateful, you were just angry.

Now, think about a time when you dialed a support line and your call was quickly answered by someone happy and eager to help you.

It felt nice, right?

Well, your visitors feel the same way about landing on your website.

A slow website is like poor customer service. Instead of waiting patiently for your content to load, visitors are more likely to become frustrated and leave. Even if they hang around, they’ll be skeptical about the quality of your content.

A fast-loading website, on the other hand, gives readers a good experience from the outset and shows your content in the very best light.

Why Google Hates Slow Websites Too

In addition to providing a poor user experience, your site’s search rankings can be affected by sluggish performance.

That’s because Google has been known to punish websites with slow load times.

Page load time is just one of many factors that determine your rankings, but why put your site at a disadvantage? A lower ranking means reduced exposure for your content.

After all, SEO is complicated enough without introducing issues you can easily fix.

In addition, your site’s speed is particularly important for mobile devices since their networks are not as fast or reliable as the fixed connection you’d expect when working from a desktop. As you probably know, the number of people accessing sites via mobile devices continues to climb, so this issue will only become more important.

(If you want to stop mobile users bouncing, you need to make sure your site looks great on mobile too, but that’s another story.)

So how do you know if your website even has a performance problem?

Warning: Your Site Speed Problems May Be Hidden from View

Even if your site seems fast enough to you, it may not seem so to others.

In fact, various reasons might cause your site to perform better for you than for new visitors. For example:

  • Your browser will already have cached images that others will need to download.
  • Your site may be hosted somewhere geographically closer to you than many of your visitors.
  • You may be using a fast “wired” connection where others are relying on mobile networks.

Also, there’s an important perception factor. New visitors will be more acutely aware of your site’s performance because it’s their first experience – you’ll just be used to the speed you normally get.

Many articles on site speed will give you multiple potential problems to address along with ways to address them. However, blindly attempting to fix “potential issues” could render few, if any, results.

Why? Because all sites are different.

That’s why the key to solving any problems associated with your site’s speed is to test your website first.

How to Test Your Website’s Speed with GTmetrix

Let’s face it, you’d be dumb to try to fix a problem you may not have.

That’s why you should always test your website before attempting to improve its performance.

One valuable tool to have in your arsenal is GTmetrix.

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GTmetrix

GTmetrix analyzes your website’s page load speeds and recommends solutions based on a proprietary grading system.

Here’s how to generate a performance report for your site:

  1. Go to the GTmetrix website.
  2. Paste in your website URL and click on the Analyze button.
  3. Wait a few seconds.
  4. View the report to see the results and recommendations.

As an example, here’s a report created for Smart Blogger:

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To give you an overview of your site’s performance, GTmetrix uses the following metrics:

  • PageSpeed Score – This is Google’s system for scoring your website’s speed and overall performance. (Remember, if Google thinks your site is fast, that’s good for SEO.) The letter next to the score is an overall grade for your website based on its score – A is the best grade, F is the worst. The arrow indicates how your site’s score compares to the average – in this case, the up arrow means it’s higher than average.
  • YSlow Score – This is Yahoo’s system for scoring your site’s speed and overall performance. Again, your score is given a grade, and an arrow shows how the score compares to other websites analyzed by GTmetrix.
  • Page Load Time – This is how long it takes an average user to view an entire page on your website. A shorter page load time is best. If you hover over the arrow, you can compare the average load time of other websites to yours.
  • Total Page Size – This indicates the average file size of your website’s pages. The goal is to have small file sizes, and again, you can compare your site to others evaluated by GTmetrix by hovering over the arrow.
  • Requests – This is the number of individual file requests (e.g., for HTML, CSS files, images, etc.) needed to load the page. Each request has an overhead for establishing and “tearing down” a connection, so it’s best to have fewer requests to reduce the load on your server and overall response time.

While this data is interesting, the real benefit of running the report is the list of recommendations GTmetrix creates based on its results.

Here’s an example:

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GTmetrix groups potential problem areas into easy-to-understand recommendations such as “Optimize images” or “Leverage browser caching.” The issues requiring the most urgent attention are at the top with the remaining recommendations listed in the order they affect the website’s speed.

Click on the arrow located to the left of each recommendation to get an explanation of each issue and the specific problem areas.

GTmetrix is one of the best tools available for testing your website’s speed and performance, but it’s not your only option – other free tools such as PageSpeed Insights (from Google) and Pingdom are also good choices. Whichever you go with, picking one tool and sticking to it is probably the smartest strategy.

How to Make the Optimizations Your Blog Needs

Reports like the one generated by GTmetrix are invaluable, but the lingo can be intimidating. If you don’t understand the recommendations, how are you to make any improvements?

So let’s look at some of the more common types of recommendations and see how to implement them in practice.

#1: Optimize Images for Faster Loading and Lower Server Stress

Poorly optimized images are one of the most common causes of website performance issues. Images, regardless of their file format, are often too large, consuming unnecessary space on your server and taking longer than necessary to transfer to your visitor’s browser.

The goal of image optimization should be to find the right compromise between the quality of an image and its file size. That being said, to optimize an image correctly, you must first ensure it’s in the right format.

A Crash Course in Popular Image Formats

There are three image formats the average blogger is likely to encounter:

  • GIF (Graphic Interchange Format) – GIF is one of the oldest image file types still in use and works best for images with large text elements or areas of flat color such as simple logos, icons, or symbols. They usually result in relatively small file sizes but due to their limited palette (only 256 colors) it is not recommended you use this format for photographs or images with lots of detail. However, one important feature is that GIFs also support simple animations.
  • PNG (Portable Network Graphics) – The PNG format was designed as a replacement for GIF. It supports a much higher number of colors and tends to produce smaller file sizes, particularly for images like screenshots. PNG used to have an issue of not being supported by older browsers, but these days the only practical advantage of GIF over PNG is the animation feature.
  • JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) – JPEG is a popular image format, used by over 70% of website owners. You can use JPEGs for images of any type, but they were designed primarily for photographs. The format is particularly good at compressing the rich detail of a photo so that it displays well at different sizes while still creating a very small file.

When it comes to choosing the best format for new images, here are some simple rules to follow:

  • If your image is a photograph or a complex image with lots of detail and colors, use JPEG.
  • If you image is a screenshot, illustration, or has lots of text, use PNG.
  • If you want to use simple animation (but you don’t want to embed a video player), use GIF (but avoid it in all other situations).

Now that you have an idea of the different online image types you might be uploading to your website, let’s take a look at the proper optimization steps you should take before uploading any image.

Step 1) Crop Your Images

The first step to optimizing an image for your website, whether it be a diagram, a photograph, or a screenshot, is to crop your image.

The original version of an image – for example, one taken with your camera or captured from your computer screen – is unlikely to have the perfect framing.

Cropping elements that detract from the main focus of your image achieves two things.  First, it draws your reader’s attention to the important details.  Second, it naturally decreases your image file size, which is great for optimization.

Here’s an example of a photograph which has been cropped to emphasize the main subject, the two dogs:

Site Speed - Image 5

You have several options for cropping your images.

For instance, the pre-installed Paint application works for Windows users. Likewise, Preview is a good choice for Mac users.

Another great image editor available for desktop use is Gimp.  This free software is similar to Photoshop and has a large number of image editing tools, including a cropping feature. It conveniently works on Linux, Mac, and Windows computers.

Step 2) Resize Your Images

Often an image, regardless of its format, is far too large for your blog.

There’s little point in uploading an image from your camera or smartphone that’s over 3,000 pixels wide if the largest size you’ll display it on your blog is 600 pixels wide.

Remember, larger files take up more space, cause additional strain on your server, and take a long time to upload when a visitor views a page containing that image. Plus, depending on your website’s theme, larger images may not even render correctly on the page.

WordPress attempts to solve this issue by automatically creating three different versions of any image you upload – thumbnail, medium, and full size. This resizing process creates additional load on your server and doesn’t actually save disk space because it stores the image at its original size too.

Also, when you add an image to a post from the Media Library, the default size is the original size, so you must manually select one of the smaller sizes.

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The answer is to resize your images before you upload them. The tools mentioned in the previous step can also be used to resize your images.

If you are looking for an online-only solution that does not require a download of any kind, you might consider using the free options, Pixlr or Fotoflexer.

Step 3) Compress Your Images

File compression is one of the most important tactics for image optimization. By removing any unnecessary information embedded in your images (information the human eye cannot even perceive), you can efficiently decrease the image’s file size while keeping its quality intact.

TinyPNG

One solution for making your website’s image files smaller is to use a free online tool called TinyPNG. Despite the name, TinyPNG is a great resource for optimizing both PNG and JPEG files.

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Using the tool is simple. Either drag and drop your desired image files into the designated area or click on the upload area and search your local hard drive for the images you want to compress. TinyPNG will then compress your image and provide a download link for you to save your new, smaller-sized image file to your computer.

When you are ready to upload your image to your website, simply go to Add Media in your visual editor, Upload Files, and either drag and drop your compressed image or select the appropriate files from your computer.  The image selected will already be compressed (and should be resized and cropped as well), so it is optimized for use on your site.

(If you’re optimizing an image already in use on your site, you’ll need to update that image link to point to the compressed image.)

WP Smush

Another awesome tool for compressing your website’s images is to use the free WordPress plugin WP Smush. Rather than manually compressing images via TinyPNG, this plugin provides an automatic approach to image compression by optimizing images as soon as you upload them to your site.  Simply uploading your image to the Media Library will initiate the “smushing” (a.k.a. compression).

WP Smush also gives you the option to bulk “smush” your already uploaded images, making their file sizes much smaller and more optimized.

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The most powerful features (e.g., no file size limits and bulk smushing with one click) require a paid subscription. However, it may be worth it if you use a lot of images on your site or your images are causing significant problems with page load speeds.

Image optimization (cropping, resizing, and compressing) is one of the easiest ways to improve your website’s performance, particularly if you have an image-heavy site.

Incorporate it into your publishing routine and your readers will see the benefits almost instantly.

#2: Minify JavaScript and CSS for Smaller Files and Fewer Requests

A common recommendation from GTmetrix is to “minify” JavaScript and CSS files on your site. Along with your theme’s HTML and associated images, these files contribute to your site’s appearance and behavior.

Minifying these files essentially means making them smaller, for example by minimizing unnecessary white space.

Also, every time the server requests your content it makes a new connection; if you have several CSS and JavaScript files, the overhead can be significant. The more calls the visitor’s browser makes to your server, the more overworked your server becomes, and thus the slower you website will tend to load.

Minifying also combines your CSS and JavaScript files into a single file – usually one per file type. This can greatly decrease the number of requests required to fetch all the required information.

Several free WordPress plugins exist to minify your files. Check out Better WordPress Minify or WP Super Minify.

#3: Leverage Caching to Avoid Unnecessary Reloading of Resources

Caching plugins are one of the most effective ways to improve your website’s speed.

Normally, each time someone requests a page from your site, your server dynamically builds the page HTML from scratch using WordPress’s core code and your site’s theme. But the thing is, that HTML often stays the same from request to request.

Caching is the process of delivering static versions of HTML files to your visitors rather than creating them dynamically each time. Essentially, they create the files once and then store a copy. This decreases the amount of calls made to your server, lowers the server load, and reduces bottlenecks.

The best caching plugins also have other performance-related features, such as minification, meaning you would not have to use a separate minification plugin. Just be sure to check your caching plugin’s full feature set before ditching the minifying plugin.

Here are some of the most reputable WordPress plugins for caching, though you should only implement one at a time on your website to avoid internal conflicts amongst plugins:

All three will work, but for this example, we’ll use W3 Total Cache since it minifies files as well. To enable server-side caching, follow these steps:

  1. Install and activate W3 Total Cache.
  2. Go to Performance > General Settings on the right-hand side of your WordPress dashboard and scroll down to the “Page Cache” section.
  3. Next to “Page cache,” click the checkbox to enable page caching.
  4. For “Page cache method:” select the recommended setting for your hosting setup (for instance, “Disk: Enhanced” is best for a shared server).
  5. Click “Save all settings.”
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Caching is not limited to the server, however. The plugin also has settings that allow you to tell the visitor’s browser to cache certain files.

In fact, this feature specifically addresses the GTmetrix recommendation “Leverage Browser Caching.”

Here’s how to activate this functionality:

  1. Under General Settings scroll down to the “Browser Cache” section.
  2. Next to “Browser Cache,” click the checkbox to enable browser caching.
  3. Click “Save all settings.”
Site Speed - Image 10

W3 Total Cache is a richly featured plugin with many different options. Understanding all the possibilities is beyond the expertise of most bloggers, but there is a simple way to switch on all recommended caching without worrying about the low-level detail.

Here’s how:

  1. Under General Settings, find the “General” section toward the top of the page.
  2. Click the “Enable” button to allow you to test any changes before deploying them to your site.
  3. Check the box adjacent to “Toggle all caching types on or off (at once)” – this will change the required fields lower in the page.
  4. Click the “Preview” button to make sure your site’s behavior seems normal.
  5. Assuming all is well, click “Deploy” to make the changes permanent, then “Disable” to disable the preview functionality.
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Note: Most managed WordPress hosting providers come with their own caching solution, so you should check what’s already provided before installing your own plugin.

#4: Identify Plugins That Are Dragging Your Site Down

Plugins. Your sweet, precious plugins.

They’re one of the main benefits of choosing WordPress over other blogging platforms, but they can also be a hidden enemy. Particularly when it comes to performance.

Too many plugins, or just one poorly coded plugin, can have more of an impact on your site’s performance than any of the other factors we’ve discussed so far.

How? Here are just a few of the causes:

  • Additional HTTP requests. Some plugins, especially ones with rich front-end functionality, may require custom styling or scripts to work properly. This means that they add extra JavaScript and CSS file requests, causing higher server load and more demand on the network.
  • Database-intensive queries. Many plugins store and retrieve data using the WordPress database, and inefficient or complex queries can cause significant load times and poor performance.
  • Plugin conflicts. Some plugins don’t play nicely with other plugins or WordPress themes, causing potential security risks and performance issues.

It’s difficult to know for sure that a problem reported by GTmetrix is related to the plugins you have installed on your site.

Luckily, it’s pretty straightforward to evaluate your plugins to see if one or two are causing problems for the rest of your website, and to keep only the ones essential to your website’s functionality. Although it may be tough to let go of some of your favorite plugins, if they’re causing performance issues, that’s too high a price to pay.

One way to evaluate how your plugins are affecting your site’s performance is to use the P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler) plugin.

Here’s how to use it:

  1. Install and activate the P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler) plugin.
  2. Go to Tools > P3 Plugin Profiler (or find P3 Plugin Profiler on your main plugins page).
  3. Click “Start Scan,” then “Auto Scan.”
  4. Wait for the scan to complete (it might take a few minutes), then click “View Results.”
  5. Scroll down to the Runtime by Plugin graph.
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This chart shows which plugins are taking the most time to load on your website. Look out for plugins that seem to hog a disproportionate amount of time for the functionality they provide (or at least, for the value you get from that functionality).

Be aware that certain plugins may show artificially high results due to the way the profiler works. Fortunately, the plugins likely to be giving a “false positive” like this are listed at the bottom of the report – one such example is Jetpack by WordPress. Since those results are often inaccurate, you probably do not need to worry much about these plugins affecting your site.

If a plugin appears to be causing performance issues, try deactivating it and running the test again. And remember, if deactivating a certain plugin has a marked effect on performance, it might not always be the culprit. It may be that it conflicts with another plugin and that removing either one will solve the problem. So try to be systematic with your testing and don’t jump to conclusions too quickly.

Whenever you have made any changes to your configuration that you hope will improve performance, remember to rerun GTmetrix to discover the true effect. If removing a much-loved plugin has little effect on your site’s speed, and you have no other reason to believe it’s problematic, there’s no strong reason to remove it.

Give Your Visitors the Experience They Deserve

Website performance is a broad and complex topic, and we’ve only scratched the surface.

But you should now know enough to check your website’s basic performance.

So ask yourself, how does your site come across to your viewers?

Is it eager and responsive like a friendly, well-trained customer service representative?

Or does it keep people waiting in line while their frustration boils over?

Now you’re equipped with the knowledge you need, and poor performance can’t stay hidden any longer.

You even know how to resolve some of the most common problems.

It’s up to you to show visitors that their experience on your site matters. If your site performs well, they’ll assume your content is high-quality too.

Blazing fast speeds are not out of reach, so saddle up for the race.

You can leave your competitors in the dust.

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Devesh Sharma

Dev Sharma is a WordPress fanatic and founder of WPKube, a site where you will find exclusive deals, in-depth guides, tutorials, and other useful resources to help you get most out of WordPress.

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Written by Devesh Sharma

Dev Sharma is a WordPress fanatic and founder of WPKube, a site where you will find exclusive deals, in-depth guides, tutorials, and other useful resources to help you get most out of WordPress.

54 thoughts on “Is Your WordPress Blog Slower Than You Think? (And How to Fix It)”

  1. Great post, Devesh. Love your work over at WPKube, nice to see you on BBT. I tried WPSmush with some success but found it to be a bit overkill for my blog.

    Thanks for sharing.

    -Cody

    Reply
  2. This is something that I have been struggling with a lot lately and there seem to be few resources that cover the topic in strong detail like this.

    The problem is especially noticeable in bulky themes which are often the more visually appealing to use.

    Anyway, thank you for posting this and I’ll be implementing it soon!

    Reply
    • Good point – most of the themes floating around (especially on ThemeForest) are visually appealing and aren’t optimized for speed.

      Glad to hear that and thanks for your comment, Lewis.

      Reply
  3. Great post Devesh! A plugin that I highly recommend is Autoptimize which concatenates and compresses the CSS and JavaScript code. That plugin is one of the main reasons why I have a 96 Page Speed Score and a 92 YSlow Score.

    BTW, most people only look at their homepage on GTmetrix. In my opinion, it’s worth looking at ALL of your pages and making any necessary changes.

    Reply
    • Thanks for the suggestion, Ed. I’ll check it out :).

      Definitely, one should look for 1-2 individual pages, as well to make sure things are running smoothly. But in my opinion, inner pages will always take a little bit extra to load, if you are using rich snippets, click to tweet, social media buttons, and other useful plugins that only loads on single pages.

      Reply
  4. Thank you, Devesh, for reminding us to take care of our end users experience! I don’t know about other people, but I frequently become so embroiled in producing material that I forget to take care of the system that provides for my audience. Not only that, but I can personally vouch for how frustrating and disappointing it is when trying to read other people’s content on websites that aren’t functioning at their best!
    You have my gratitude – your timely reminder is bumping this up my priority list.

    Reply
  5. Thank you for the tutorial. I must admit I tend to upload images to Wordpress before optimizing them for the web – the end result are very heavy pages that can take centuries to load.
    Silly me, I used to think choosing a smaller verison of the photo to display on my posts would reduce the image size.

    Nice guide – loved the tools here as well!

    Reply
    • No problem Ed. We all make those type of mistakes at some point. Though, just to be clear using a small version does reduce the image size, but you should still optimize it using Tinypng or Optimus plugin.

      Thanks for your comment.

      Reply
  6. Great and timely post Devesh. Very helpful! I’m in the process of changing themes and also web hosts. For me, speed is part of the problem–not so much for desktop but for mobile and also the current mobile site sucks the big petunia! The menu is in another galaxy creating a too-high bounce rate! My current theme has no plans to update to 2016 standards, so ba bye!

    Reply
    • Glad you found it helpful, Laurel.

      You should checkout some of the StudioPress and MyThemeShop, they have by far some of the fast performing themes.

      As for web hosts, I recently wrote an in-depth guide on choosing the right hosting, here‘s the link (might be useful).

      Thanks for your comment, Laurel. Have a great week ahead.

      Reply
  7. Davesh, great summary article and some solid tips to improve the speed. I have been using a few of these tips and score high in results for page speed etc. with GTMetrix. I have a specific question though.

    Do you think that to check the homepage only is enough to get a flavour? or do you think that each individual page/post has its own speed which affects the overall SEO performance of your website/blog?

    Sharing it with the community, nice article, specially good for bloggers who manage their own WP sites/blogs. Cheers

    Reply
    • Good point, Ahmad. I think one should check the individual / inner pages, as well. But in my opinion, individual pages will always load a bit slower especially if you have rich snippets, related posts, social media buttons, and other elements that only loads on individual pages.

      Thanks for stopping by.

      Reply
  8. Really great tips on how to speed up your site! I think many fail on optimizing images for their site, I certainly did that mistake when I started blogging! Thanks for this really needed article!

    Reply
  9. Hi Devesh,

    I like that you likened a slow website to being put on hold. I’ve never thought of it that way, and you’re right, it is infuriating.

    I’ll be sure to check out GTmetrix to make sure my blog is in tip top shape.

    Thanks,
    Sue

    Reply
  10. Everything is fine, except the comment about Related Posts. I understand your point of view, but it’s technical. From a digital journalism point of view related posts are an absolute necessity. True, there are third party companies, but that’s another httpd request, which basically deletes the benefit of not running a query on your site. Also, they often come with tons of advertising. Not really good.

    Reply
  11. Hey Devesh!
    Nice post.. 🙂

    Really great idea described by you Devesh. For making wordpress faster and smoother really things should be apply. But due to lack of idea, we can’t do it.

    Following this post really help wordpress to make faster. One more important thing that is “GTmatrix” which is one of the best tool have described. The above described steps are really informative for making website faster.

    Thanks for good informative knowledge.. 🙂
    Have a nice day!

    – Ravi.

    Reply
  12. Dev I like this statement you made. ‘A slow website is like poor customer service’ I think people should know that their website is the gateway to their business. I have often said that many times on my blog.

    Thank you for this great job.

    Reply
  13. Very nice post, In addition to what you mentioned I think CDN can play very effective roles in saving bandwidth and improve performance.

    In addition, Server performance can play very important role so hosting should be done wisely.

    Few small other factors could be avoid inline styles & javascript.

    Reply
    • Definitely!

      Hosting and CDN plays a important role in speed. These are also two of the things that doesn’t require much effort.

      Thanks for stopping by. Have a great day.

      Reply
  14. Hi Devesh.
    How are you?
    We are a married couple from Mumbai, India.
    We started blogging in the first week of this year.
    This post of yours is very good
    As we understand the importance
    Of a website opening quickly.
    But…how do we determine
    Whether our blog is opening slow or not?
    IF it is…
    How do we know for sure
    If the issue is blog related
    Or due to our ISP?
    Would love your inputs.
    Thank you and regards.

    Reply
  15. Devesh, thanks for the recommendations. I hadn’t paid to much attention to the speed of my site in a while. Like you said, it loads pretty fast for me because I’m on it all the time. I ran it through gtmetrix.com and got a couple recommendations of things to improve. I took it’s advice to enable browser caching and immediately improved the score from a “D” to a “C”. There are two more areas I can work on that will take a little more time that should further improve my score and speed. Thanks.

    Reply
  16. Hey Devesh,

    Thanks for the lesson here. I’ve was looking for ways to make my blog faster and you hit on some great ideas and tools. One thing about using speed analysis is that some the fixes they recommended can be confusing because of the jargon. I’m glad that you cleared some of them, especially #2!

    Have a good one Devesh!

    Reply
  17. No love for CloudFlare? CloudFlare combined with a couple things in this post (TinyPNG, especially) helped make my previously snail-like sites speedy as a jackrabbit. Plus they protect you from DDOS attacks and stuff, so that’s nice.

    Oh, also, CloudFlare is FREE! Though you can pay if you want their fancier features.

    Reply
  18. …and There is one more thing you could do.. Move to a better dedicated Server.
    Not matter how well you optimize the website, if the server is sh*t then the whole website will be slow no matter what.
    Other than that, Minifying Scripts can speed things up by a little bit. Updating system to the latest version of php can also do the magic sometimes.
    For ex, php 5.3 was super slow comparing with php 5.6 – 7. My website was running out of memory all the time when the server was running on php 5.3 and I solved that by switching to 5.6. Now it all seems fine..
    Also, Adding a SWAP memory file can help the page loading speeds.

    That was a good read. Thank you.

    Reply
  19. Hii sir,

    Thank goodness someone is promoting quality content. I often struggle with myself: do I post something on my blog to post something, or wait to post something worth saying.

    Reply
  20. Yes! Almost every blogger or webmaster faces these problems. I am also one of those unsuccessful bloggers who was worried about poor performance of my WordPress websites. After doing lot of research, I finally found one superb blog that provided me complete information about the problems of slow WordPress website and also the remedies of fixing these issues…
    Thank you very much…
    Cheers
    Jennifer

    Reply
  21. Thanks for this post Devesh!

    I’m just about to launch my blog (I’m a newb), and this is something that I have been worried about.

    I’m about to head over to GTmetrix now.

    I appreciate the help.

    Reply

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