1. Why is my site slow?

There are so many exciting options out there – sliding images, Facebook feeds, pop up messages, special effect galleries and so much more that it becomes really tempting to add glamour and fun stuff to your site. Simply put though, each little bit of weight that is added to a website asks the server to do more work. At some point the amount of work we’re asking the server has a negative impact on our audiences experience and it’s time to start lightening it up.

2. How can I make my site faster?

It’s important to start with great foundations. First prize is a website that has just what you need in it and no more.

If your business doesn’t need a portfolio, a team members section, testimonials, a video gallery, events calendar … your website shouldn’t even have them installed.

Unfortunately most general purpose WordPress themes include these by default and there is no way to remove them. We create custom themes built for purpose – your purpose.

If your WordPress website already has a prebuilt theme installed – you are going to need to start by cleaning up your site. This looks like removing unneeded plugins, switching off unnecessary options and ‘cache’ the website.

Caching is storing a quick loading version of the page so it asks the server to do less work.

3. Are too many plug-ins bad for my site?

This is a common question, but it’s not the number of plugins but the quality of plugins.

So, you must choose carefully.

Select a plugin based on your specific need, not the number of features. Often, the less a plugin does, the better.

And most importantly: check out the support section of the plug in to see if the developer is answering questions quickly, and whether other users experiencing frustrations or problems.

If they are – then it might be a good reason to move on, and find an alternative.

4. What else could be slowing my site down?

One of the most common (and overlooked) things to slow down websites are the images!

This is absolutely one of the most frequent problems issues we see, and can be a relatively easy fix to improve slow websites. The images you imported from your phone’s 12 megapixel high res camera are just way too large.

You can use Photoshop or even Canva.com to help resize and reduce the size of your images.

Some common image sizes (width only) for websites are:

+ 2000px for full screen images

+ 1200px for images that are the same width as your blog post

+ 600px wide for half image/half text block and

+ 150px for your thumbnails, avatars and logos.

5. Is Divi a good theme for site speed?

Unfortunately, no.

Divi and similar general purpose themes are great for novice web builders, but not great for developers chasing the best performance.

The reason is that Divi adds a large number of features to make it easy to build websites. But as we now know, these features can ask the server to work too hard.

6. What’s the best WooCommerce theme for site speed?

Start with a lean and mean theme – the default Woocommerce Storefront theme would be fine if you aren’t using a developer. Then slowly add the features and options you absolutetely need making sure to check performance as you go.

7. How do I fix a slow WooCommerce site?

Use a speed testing service like GTMetrix or Googles Pagespeed Insights to tell what it is that is slowing your site down.

If they are simple issues like images that are too large, you can fix that yourself quite easily.

The test will also show you whether Google’s own services, or social sites and their plugins are causing a performance hit. If so, try disabling some of those plugins and test again.

However, if your test results are asking you fix arcane sounding issues, it would be best for you to consult a professional.

Photo Credit: Photo by Gary Barnes from Pexels