WordPress (WP) is one of the most popular platforms for building blogs and websites quickly — from personal blogs and news sites to eCommerce stores and even Fortune 500 company websites.
It allows you to easily publish content and create structured navigation using various elements, in a way that was previously difficult to achieve. For most site owners, the underlying technology doesn’t matter as much. In this context, many enhance their websites with add-ons, plugins, and other tools to make their site look more appealing.
But what truly matters to visitors is the user experience (UX) and page speed.
In this article, I’ll introduce a few common elements that block or delay a website’s loading time:
1. 🖼️ Large Image Sizes and Unoptimized Media
Problem:
Images are often the largest assets on a webpage. A single high-resolution image can be several megabytes in size. If you upload several large images without optimizing them, your page load time will skyrocket, especially for users on slower connections.
Why It Matters:
- Large images delay the “first contentful paint” (FCP), making the page seem slow.
- Mobile users on limited data plans experience higher data costs and slower speeds.
- Search engines may penalize pages with slow load times.
Solutions:
- Image Compression: Use tools like TinyPNG, ImageOptim, or plugins like WP Smush or ShortPixel.
- Modern Formats: Convert images to WebP or AVIF. They offer better compression than JPEG or PNG without losing quality.
- Lazy Loading: Only load images when they’re about to appear in the viewport. WordPress supports native lazy loading (loading=”lazy”), or you can use plugins like a3 Lazy Load.
- Image CDN: Services like Cloudinary, Imgix, or ImageKit not only host your images but also optimize and serve them quickly through a CDN.
- Self-Hosted S3 Alternatives: If you want to control costs or data, deploy your own object storage using tools like MinIO or Wasabi. This can also offload image serving from your main server.
2. 🧠 Poor Caching Strategy
Problem:
Without proper caching, every user request forces the server to reprocess the entire page — from database queries to PHP execution — slowing down delivery.
Types of Caching:
- Page Caching: Stores full HTML pages so they don’t have to be regenerated.
- Object Caching: Stores results of expensive database queries.
- Browser Caching: Instructs browsers to store static resources (CSS, JS, images) locally.
- Opcode Caching: Stores compiled PHP code in memory to speed up backend execution.
Solutions:
- Caching Plugins: Use plugins like WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache, or LiteSpeed Cache to enable multiple levels of caching.
Server-Side Tools:
- Varnish Cache: Acts as a reverse proxy and caches pages in RAM.
- Redis or Memcached: Store database results to reduce repeated queries.
CDN Caching:
- Services like Cloudflare, Fastly, or Bunny.net cache your static assets on global edge servers.
- Cloudflare also offers “Cache Everything” rules for dynamic content.
Set Proper Headers: Use Cache-Control and Expires headers to guide how long browsers and proxies should store files.
3. 🌍 No or Poor Use of Content Delivery Networks (CDNs)
Problem:
Without a CDN, all content is served from your main server, which could be geographically far from many users, increasing latency.
What a CDN Does:
- Distributes your static (and sometimes dynamic) content to servers located globally.
- Serves content from the server closest to the visitor, reducing latency.
- Helps absorb traffic spikes and DDoS attacks.
Benefits:
- Faster page loads globally.
- Reduced bandwidth consumption on your origin server.
- Improved redundancy and reliability.
Popular CDN Services:
- Cloudflare: Offers a free plan with strong DDoS protection, SSL, and CDN services.
- Fastly: Known for edge computing capabilities and real-time configuration.
- Bunny.net: Affordable and high-performance CDN.
- KeyCDN, Akamai, and Amazon CloudFront are also solid options.
We’ve reached the end of this post. If you enjoyed it, feel free to explore our other articles. You might also be interested in the tools and products we develop to help your business grow and boost sales.
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