Working With WordPress
If your site is built with WordPress, there can be many reasons why your website is slow. To start, a WordPress website consists of a pages/posts, plugins and a theme. The theme controls all the styling for your website. This includes colours, fonts, layouts, etc. Whereas, plugins create additional functionality to your website. This could be, a contact form or shopping cart. Unfortunately, performance issues can arise from a poorly built theme with an abundance of plugins. To see how well your site compares, test your website now for free with PageSpeed.
Remove Extra Plugins
Less is more, when it comes to plugins. If your website is riddled with plugins, the website must work harder to process the additional functionality. What’s more, there is a high chance a plugin conflict can occur. Essentially, slowing down your site or potentially breaking it. Whilst removing plugins is good, it cant always be possible. Some websites are reliant on the extra functionality that plugins provide and cannot be removed. As a result, the only way to cull important plugins is to properly custom code the extra functionality into the website. This can be done, by integrating the plugin functionality directly into the theme. Which is highly effective at improving performance. It is important to get an experienced WordPress developer to do this to correctly optimise the implementation.
Fix Your Theme
The overall theme is causing the majority of the performance throttling, which would need an overhaul to rectify. Re-writing the theme would aim to cull majority of the plugins to combine plugin functionality. As well as, designing with mobile-first approach, seeking mobile performance and optimisation benefits. Making the front and back end quicker and easier to use. The site will also seek SEO benefits in a re-build; being built using correct data structuring as well as design techniques favoured by google bots. If your site uses a premium theme editor, this also plays a big role in the performance issues. We recommend removing the editor completely and using the in-built WordPress editor. As you can see, correctly structuring the re-build will positively benefit your site in more ways than just performance.
If Your Website Is Slow…
We highly recommend a theme re-structure/re-build to highly improve website performance. Other methods of website optimization may be cheaper. However, there’s barely a noticeable difference in performance by the user. Basically, the website will run faster with a redesign.
Contact Host One if your website is slow to get a website performance audit.
