Your visitors care about every second!
You don’t know how much traffic to your WordPress blog you loose by skipping optimization. Not only you are loosing potential visits because you don’t rank 1st on Google or at least above the fold on the SERP, but you’re also loosing visitors that actually arrive to your website but are to annoyed to stay! Do you know that a visitor is very likely to leave your website if after 4 seconds — this is the average — he doesn’t see any sign of life.
WHY IS IT SO SLOW?
WordPress is a great piece of software, it has a huge collection of themes and plugins, wordpress.org alone hosts 20,137 plugins and 1,546 themes.
Most of the themes – even the paid ones – lack basic optimization and use many images and sometimes many CSS and JS files.
On the other hand, most plugins are pretty well optimized for performance and consume only a few milliseconds, but using them without moderation will add unneeded processing time, not only slowing your website but also degrading to some extent the overall performance of the server that hosts your blog.
Main culprit - plugins
Plugins are the prime suspect for slowdowns in your Wordpress install.
With so many Wordpress plugins available, chances are you installed a plugin that doesn't use resources in an optimum way.
Things to try:
- -Deactivate all your plugins
- -Check the critical areas of the site again. If the site runs better, re-enable plugins 1 by 1 until you find the problematic plugin.
Plugins that are designed to pull data or 'scrape' from other sites can run at very high loads. These plugins may cause your site to be suspended due to excessive resource load. These plugins are usually not recommended for use in shared hosting environments.
What can I do?
Here is a list of articles that you can reference with tips on optimizing your blog for peak performance: