Want to Make Your WordPress Site Faster?

Follow these essential tips and boost your site’s performance.

Hey, hello! Got your attention?
Great – that’s already an achievement. People are becoming increasingly impatient.
Back in 2000, our average attention span was 12 seconds. By 2016, it had dropped to just 7 seconds. And it’s still shrinking…

If you own a website, you need to capture visitors’ interest quickly. If you don’t, they’ll leave – and head straight to your competitor. A slow website means losing visitors, revenue, and ultimately, profit.

How to Know If Your WordPress Website Is Slow

When was the last time you tested your WordPress site’s speed?
It might feel fast to you — but that can be misleading.

Modern browsers like Google Chrome store parts of websites locally (called caching), especially if you visit them often. This makes them load faster for you, but a first-time visitor might experience a completely different (and much slower) version.

That’s why it’s important to run an objective speed test.

There are plenty of great website speed testing tools available online. Recommended options include:

They all work in pretty much the same way:
Enter your website URL, click the ‘Analyze button, and wait a few moments for the results.
One tool might provide more detailed insights, while another gives you a simple overall score.

As a rule of thumb, a good page load time is under 2 seconds.
If your site takes more than 5 seconds to load, you could be losing up to 90% of your visitors – they simply won’t wait.

  • 💡 Tip: IsItWP is a free speed testing tool specifically for WordPress sites. Due to high demand, it doesn’t always work perfectly – but when it does, it provides helpful suggestions for improvement.
  • 💡 Note: Many speed testing tools only analyze the specific URL you enter. That means the results don’t necessarily reflect the performance of your entire site.

What Makes a WordPress Website Slow?

fter testing one or more pages of your site, you’ll have a general idea of its speed.
But why is a site fast – or slow? WordPress runs on the PHP programming language. PHP contains all the instructions that tell your website how to function. These instructions are stored in separate files, which need to be loaded by the server.

The more plugins and heavy files your server has to process, the slower your site will be. It also requires more memory (RAM) to execute all those commands quickly. Note: Increasing your PHP memory does not automatically make your site faster.

Read our blog on increasing PHP memory