Key Factors That Impact The Loading Speed Of A Website

The average web user typically loses interest and leaves a site if it takes more than two seconds to load. Most search engines like Google use this speed to determine your site’s Search Engine Results Page (SERP) ranking. To ensure optimal loading times, it’s important to understand the key factors that influence the loading speed of a website.

At White Label Agency, we provide a wide range of WordPress outsourcing services, including top-tier maintenance. With over a decade of experience, we’ve crafted and managed high-performing WordPress sites for 600+ agencies. Explore our range of maintenance packages, divided into four flexible maintenance plans, and elevate your agency.

Factors Affecting WordPress Website Loading Speed

The speed of a website is one of the most critical aspects of your WordPress site because your visitors expect a fast and smooth experience. These are the most common elements that slow down a WordPress website:

Server Performance

The most important factor affecting the loading speed of a website is the server hosting your WordPress site. Choose a reliable hosting provider that fits your agency’s website’s requirements. If the server response time is slow, the site will load slowly. Make sure your hosting plan has enough resources, and think about how close the server is to your audience to cut down on delays.

Image Optimization

Large images often cause slow websites. Make images the right size by adjusting their dimensions and compressing them without losing quality. This makes the file size smaller, so downloads are faster, and pages show up more quickly. The plugins made for optimizing images simplify this task.

Plugin Management

Plugins add features, but they can make your site slow down. Check and turn off unnecessary plugins regularly. Choose lightweight ones that do what you need. Old or badly made plugins can slow down your site, so keep them up to date and ensure they work with your WordPress version.

Theme Selection

Your choice of theme matters for website speed. Pick themes that are well-coded and lightweight for better performance. Stay away from themes with too many features that add unnecessary bloat. Test themes for speed and responsiveness before putting them into action. If you need to customize, use a child theme to avoid messing with the core theme code.

External Embedded Media

Using external embedded media, like videos or widgets from outside platforms, can slow down your website. It adds extra dependencies that affect the loading speed of a website. Each external element needs its own requests and downloads, which could create traffic. To speed up your website, it’s better to host media files directly on your server whenever possible. If you really need external content, make sure it’s well-optimized and doesn’t hurt your overall website performance

Large Pages

Large pages, loaded with content and elements, don’t help your website speed. Because there’s so much to grab and show, these pages take more time to load. The tons of content, like images, scripts, and videos, mean more requests for the browser to handle, which can make the page take longer to show up. To speed up big pages, it’s crucial to simplify content and adjust media files

Solutions for Faster Loading

Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Consider where your hosting servers are and make sure they’re geographically close to your target audience. Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) are servers spread globally. When someone clicks on the content from a website, the CDN sends the request to the closest server, making the data travel less and cutting down on delays. CDNs can make WordPress websites faster by spreading content across many servers.

Optimized Database

A database stores all the content of your site. If your client has been running a site for a long time, the database might have unnecessary data, slowing down the website. To make WordPress sites faster, you can use plugins like WP-Optimize to get rid of this unused data. This plugin can also optimize the database tables, improving performance. Additionally, you can delete unused files from the WordPress media library to further improve speed.

Reliable Hosting Provider

Stable servers mean low downtime and consistent availability for users. Look for a host offering proper caching mechanisms, like server-side caching solutions, which temporarily store frequently accessed data (images, JS, and CSS files) to speed up retrieval.

Your hosting provider should handle increased traffic without affecting website performance. Assess the quality of their infrastructure and server configuration. A good provider has fast and reliable servers; check their Time to First Byte (TTFB) metric, measuring the time from a navigation request to the user receiving the first byte of the server response. WP Engine stands out with the highest percentage of sites loading in less than 200ms among WordPress platforms.

Select hosting plans based on expected traffic; a managed WordPress hosting plan should handle at least 400,000 visitors or page views per month. Ensure the support team is available, as they will assist with any issues.

Optimize Website Loading Speed With WLA

Certain page speed issues are easy to fix, and with your development team’s assistance, you should achieve a score that satisfies most website owners. However, it takes experience to know how to provide trustworthy and effective solutions for the loading speed of a website. That’s where we, at White Label Agency can help you. With over a decade of experience, custom coding more than 3,000 WordPress projects each year, we’ve worked with multiple websites.

If your agency would like to help custom-code a WordPress website, contact our sales team today to see what WLA can do for you.