Sick of having a slow website?
If your website is slow, it can be due to a range of factors, all of which can negatively affect your SEO efforts.
Humans and search engines (and their crawlers) do not like slow websites.
This article is about the main things that are probably causing your website to get bad speed scores.
Crap hosting.
Before you get into anything site-related, you need to check the hosting of your website.
WordPress needs good hosting to perform correctly, and if you are on some pile-it-high, sell-it-cheap hosting package, it will affect your site’s speed.
What is cheap hosting?
Anything that costs less than £30 per month is cheap hosting.
The likes of GoDaddy and Ionos may have tempted you with offers of seemingly too-cheap-to-be-true hosting: well, guess what, it is.
These big brands spend millions advertising their shit hosting accounts—Ionos even advertises on TV. Still, the hosting they provide is not for businesses that are serious about SEO; it’s for people who are cheap.
You see Ionos and GoDaddy (et al.) when you search for ‘best hosting company’ because they spend £1000s buying this coverage – it’s simply not true, they are not the best, they are the cheapest.
My guess is that you spend around £40 per month on your mobile phone, a business essential, so why spend less than this on hosting your website, your business’s most important marketing tool?
What is good hosting?
If you are paying north of £30 per month on your hosting account, it generally means that the hosting company is providing a suitable service for your website.
The more you pay, the more optimised your hosting environment should be.
This is not a given, as there are hosting companies that charge a premium and still deliver a crap service, but price is one of the main determining factors in hosting:
The cheaper the hosting account, the crapper it’s likely to be.
A poorly built site.
If your site has lots of plugins, a shitty theme and was built by someone who just claimed to be a WordPress developer, this is going to slow it down too.
WordPress needs to be appropriately built to be optimised, and far too many people have sites built on the cheap by someone who uses Elementor, Divi or shit like Beaver Builder.
If your site is built on one of these, optimisation (which equals speed) can be tricky as they pump out endless amounts of code and JS to acheinve even a basic layout.
What seemed like a good (cheap) way of building your WordPress site can turn into an optimisation nightmare when it goes live and you start testing it.
Too many plugins.
The more plugins your WordPress site has, the slower it gets, especially if these are process-heavy plugins like WooCommerce or Events Manager (great plugins, but they need the right hosting).
Rookie developers are usually the quickest on the plugin install trigger – they install this and that to achieve what they can’t code themselves. This results in a process-heavy website that gets slower and slower.
To fix this, a plugin audit is needed and potentially some additional coding to improve things.
Too many large files.
If I had £1 every time I look at a slow site and find 3MB PNG files uploaded to the homepage, I would be rich.
If you don’t optimise your images or upload large files, your site slows down.
Luckily you can use a plugin like Smush or Imagifty to optimise all the crap you’ve uploaded already and serve them up as WebP files to make everything better.
A lack of optimisation plugins.
Plugins like Autoptimize or WP Rocket are a must on WordPress sites.
These plugins help to optimise the delivery of your code and, in turn, speed up your site.
These are not free plugins, but they are worth the investment to optimise your site correctly.
I feel your pain: you paid for a bag of sh*t.
I hate delivering the news that your SEO is in trouble because your site is badly built, but it’s often the case.
One of the advantages of using WordPress is that these issues can usually be fixed (or at least improved) by a professional.
Book a meeting with DaveSlow DNS.
This one is a little ‘out there’, but your DNS can slow down your site.
I recommend using Cloudflare to speed up your domain name servers and benefit from an extra cache and security features.
You can try Cloudflare for free to give it a spin – it positively affects all sites.
Unoptimised JS and CSS.
Technically, this is covered by adding a caching plugin, but optimising these files can be hard depending on your site build, as JS, especially, can often break if combined or compressed.
This is often a balancing act between optimising and breaking things, so it’s best to ask a pro to do this.
Unoptimised Database.
A bulky database can also slow down your site. Things like spam comments and poor plugins can significantly increase the size of your database, and the bigger it is, the slower it gets.
A database optimisation plan can sort this out, but you must proceed with extreme caution, as these can take down your site—you must always have a backup before you do any database optimisation.
Be prepared to invest some time, money or both.
You need to invest in your website speed to get the optimal results from SEO; a slow site will hinder your efforts, so get a technical audit done and spend a few hundred pounds getting everything as good as it can be.
Dave
Dave is a WordPress SEO expert with over 20 years experience in designing, building and optimising WordPress (and non-WordPress) websites for people who are serious about SEO and want to generate more new business from their websites. He's run a creative agency for 25+ years, employs 17 staff and enjoys a good rant about SEO.
