Impatience; we all hate a long wait \u2013 whether in traffic, on phone or even online. No one would like to frustrate their website visitors because their site is too slow. Slow websites make your business suffer. Ideally, the better the site speed, the better the visitor retention and conversion rate. Up to 40% of visitors will abandon a site if it takes more than 3 secords to load.<\/p>\n
How can you check your site speed?<\/strong> The best way to monitor your site\u2019s speed is to use a third party monitoring tool such as Pingdom. These access your site from different geographical areas and compile the results for you to give a more accurate measure of your site\u2019s speed<\/p>\n What slows down your site?<\/strong> Impatience; we all hate a long wait \u2013 whether in traffic, on phone or even online. No one would like to frustrate their website visitors because their site is too slow. Slow websites make your business suffer. Ideally, the better the site speed, the better the visitor retention and conversion rate. Up to 40% of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_eb_attr":"","_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"doc_category":[1838],"doc_tag":[],"class_list":["post-5378","docs","type-docs","status-publish","hentry","doc_category-wordpress"],"year_month":"2026-06","word_count":679,"total_views":0,"reactions":{"happy":0,"normal":0,"sad":0},"author_info":{"name":"w m","author_nicename":"wm","author_url":"https:\/\/truehost.com\/support\/author\/wm\/"},"doc_category_info":[{"term_name":"WordPress","term_url":"https:\/\/truehost.com\/support\/docs-category\/wordpress\/"}],"doc_tag_info":[],"yoast_head":"\n
\nThere is one common misconception that goes around. Many people think that if a site isn\u2019t slow on your computer, it isn’t slow. Well, that may be wrong. You see, you do access your site several times on your computer. Thus, your browser caches the site pages and loads them from cache instead of fetching from the server. As such, wherever you are accessing your site from your computer, you are not really accessing it as a normal visitor would. Thus the speed statistics you receive on your computer are not entirely truthful.<\/p>\n
\nThe main causes of slow websites are:
\n\u2022 Page size \u2013 heavy webpages, those with images and videos that aren’t optimised, cause slow loading of the website
\n\u2022 Bad plug ins \u2013 wordpress plug ins that have been poorly coded can cause page lag
\n\u2022 External scripts \u2013 If your page loads too many external scripts such as Ads, it\u2019ll be slow
\n\u2022 Web hosting \u2013 a server that has not been well configured or is overloaded with users will cause delay in loading of pages
\nSo, how do you speed up your site?<\/strong>
\n\u2022 Get the right hosting. First, if you are in shared hosting, make sure your hosting provider has a good reputation with regards to uptime and server speed. Choose the best of these. Second, you\u2019ll need to decide which is better for your website: shared hosting or dedicated hosting via a VPS or Dedicated server. There\u2019s a limit with the load speeds for shared hosting. Many people share the same server so, speed will definitely be fast only to a certain point. However, for some critical websites, you\u2019ll need to have a VPS or Dedicated server provisioned for you. Have a look at how to choose whetehr you need a VPS or Shared hosting here
\n\u2022 Host videos externally. External video hosts such as Youtube, ease the burden in your server as they host videos on their servers. They also have better bandwidth offers.
\n\u2022 Perform a wordpress database clean up. WordPress sites are database driven sites. They use MySQL databases. Normally, databases become bloated with unnecessary data as time goes by. These need to be removed regularly – things like spam comments, blog post revisions, and deleted files. To perform this clean up, you can use a plugin such as WP-Optimize
\n\u2022 Use WordPress caching plug in. Instead of having a page generated every time a visitor visits your site, you can use caching plugins to save pages, which then allow subsequent visitors to load pages from cache. This greatly increases site\u2019s loading speeds. Examples of these caching plug ins are WP Rocket and W3 Total Cache
\n\u2022 Optimise images. Images give life to website pages, but if they will cause the page to load super slowly, they have no use being there. So how do you benefit from images for your webpages as you also get rid of their disadvantage? The solution is to Optimize your media. Resize and compress all your images to ensure they are just enough for your site to load fast. You can also make use of plug ins such as Smushit to Optimize your images \u2013 it reduces your image by upto 5x
\n\u2022 Update wordpress. Developers work tirelessly to make sure wordpress runs safer and faster. When a new version is released, update your site. You\u2019ll reap the benefits<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"