When you’ve got a website, like any other product or service, it needs to be high quality as well as fast! This is especially true in the world we live in now where we can have packages shipped to us in less than a day and websites that load in less than a second. If your website is taking 5+ seconds to load though, you might have more issues than you can imagine.
First, test your connection.
The first thing you need to do before jumping to the conclusion that it’s a problem with your website is to make sure it’s not you who’s lagging. You’ll need to first do a speed test by simply typing it into Google. If you’ve got anything about 1MB, you should be fine.
Next, make sure you delete your cookies for your website and try to load it. It should be trying to access completely new files since you deleted the cookies and, even so, shouldn’t take more than a second or at max two.
Lastly, ask someone else to test it for you as well in the same way. It’s possible that you’ve got a problem with your computer or some other funky issue and it’s important to know for sure it’s your website.
Check with your hosting company.
It’s easy to pass the buck from your website to the host but sometimes it’s also warranted. Look into different reviews of them, check with them and ask if there was an outtage or problem, and check to see if your website has more members or features than the service you’re paying for can reasonably support.
Reduce your amount of plugins.
One of the biggest problems with plugins is that they can take up ridiculous amounts of space when all together. This is especially true of heavy ones that do multiple things or have huge changes on your website.
Try turning off a few of your plugins, or even most of them, and see if that speeds up your website. If so, you’ve got to make some permanent changes.
For plugins that are necessary, make sure that features of it are turned off if you don’t need them. It’s also a good idea to check around and see if there’s a more streamlined version of the same thing that can help you cut back.
For ones that you don’t need, try and do the same thing using the website itself. Some plugins are used just because they’re easier or faster than simply creating it yourself. For instance, a contact sheet. You can get a plugin in 20 seconds or you could spend an hour or so creating your own.
Watch for spam or DDoS attacks.
This last one is less likely but could completely halt anyone from accessing your website.
If you allow spam to go on without any moderation, your website will not only end up being ugly and unreadable, but it might also slow down thanks to the overwhelming volume of spam posts.
As for DDoS, it’s extremely unlikely that you’ll ever have to deal with these. In short terms, it’s when someone maliciously queries your server hundreds or even thousands of times a second so as to cause your site to slow to a crawl or stop entirely.