Reducing Lag on your WordPress Website

Are you finding your WordPress Website to be laggy at times?  Do you have long load times and can’t figure out why?  We’ve got you covered with a quick guide with where your lag might be coming from and how to fix it.

Choose a good host.

The best thing you can do for your website is choose a good host and hosting plan.  Quality hosting and the right hosting package will help to reduce lag and unexpected down times.

BryZar hosting has several options for every type of website and budget. We even have free trials to get you started!

Use a stable theme.

There are loads of themes out there for WordPress that you can download, some of which look truly breathtaking.  Unfortunately, some themes also end up causing unexpected lag due to them being very heavy.

Keep in mind that many themes can also be customized to better fit what your website needs.  Don’t just look for a theme that already has everything you need where you need it.  Try and find one that can be made to be what you need.

Look into caching.

Caching will pre-build each build on your website so that when visitors go to the page, it’s already loaded and doesn’t have to request the page from the server.

Some hosts will do this for you, otherwise you’ll likely need a plugin. With BryZar, we offer advanced caching with Memcached and Redis. We also use NGINX for caching static files.

Compress your images!

This is more important if your website has many different images.  Images aren’t likely to bog you down more than a second or two, but the fact is that, when used with these other methods, every second counts.

When compressing your images, try to find a program that gives you lossless compression.  Your image quality won’t reduce by compressing it and reducing the file size.

Disable useless plugins.

As stated in previous posts, plugins are one of the biggest sources of lag.  With older sites especially, make sure you disable any plugins you’ve stopped using.

In general, the less plugins you can have working on your website, the faster it’ll load.

Keep your website and plugins updated.

For a variety of reasons, you should keep your WordPress and plugins updated.  Speed is one important factor, but so it security.  Make sure you check every week for updates.   Proper maintenance is required to keep you and your users safe, secure, and speedy.