WordPress Slow Page Load Time Problems & Solutions

My blog bosmol [dot] com has been receiving significantly more traffic in the past few months, but has a huge bounce rate. I believe it is due to the slow loading pages. The homepage loads quick, but the individual posts take forever to load. If anyone has any advice I would appreciate it.

I have removed many plug-ins and installed WP Total Cache

This has helped but it still runs very slow.

THANKS!!!

a lot of the problems related with slow loading is external elements needing to load onto the page ...

If you a relying on something from another site to load to make your site complete . .and this happens a lot with image banners (for instance) then this could be your problem .. I have on many occassions copied a banner and uploaded it to my server for loading .. much, much quicker ..

hope that helps a little, Goldie...

I just had a look at your website .. and I am pretty sure it is not the load time ... it is more to do with structure and feel ... this is obviously in my opinion, so please take it in good heart ..

for me, it's just a little 'blah' and needs something to give it some sparkle ... hence I think the bouce rate is high . .again, no disrespect intended, I'm just giving you one view from an outside sourse

Goldie...

the problem most of ppl do is adding high resolution photos to the posts and resize them in the wp post editor only. forget about this! go, grab an image editing software and resize the images you have in your posts! also, make sure to check the server logs to see if there's anything causing the slowness! last but not least, make sure to update your wordress! I had my sites load 3times faster after the new update!

another thing, google for "website speed test" and see if it's only you who experiencing the slow load time or others have this too! you can also contact the support of your hosting account and ask them to check if there's anything wrong with your site...i had this issue when one of the wordpress loops were not closing at all making my single pages load for years!

hope it helps,
regards,
z

zerodtk said:

the problem most of ppl do is adding high resolution photos to the posts and resize them in the wp post editor only. forget about this! go, grab an image editing software and resize the images you have in your posts! also, make sure to check the server logs to see if there's anything causing the slowness! last but not least, make sure to update your wordress! I had my sites load 3times faster after the new update!

another thing, google for "website speed test" and see if it's only you who experiencing the slow load time or others have this too! you can also contact the support of your hosting account and ask them to check if there's anything wrong with your site...i had this issue when one of the wordpress loops were not closing at all making my single pages load for years!

hope it helps,
regards,
z

Click to expand...

I never thought about getting an image editing software and resize the images. This could be the problem. Can I use PhotoShop for this or do I need a special software?

I will contact Blue Host and see if they have any recommendations as well.

I appreciate everyones advice. One problem I now have is that when viewing individual posts in IE the formatting is way off. Does anyone have experience with coding as I am a marketer not a coder. THANKS!!!!!

Whitegold said:

I just had a look at your website .. and I am pretty sure it is not the load time ... it is more to do with structure and feel ... this is obviously in my opinion, so please take it in good heart ..

for me, it's just a little 'blah' and needs something to give it some sparkle ... hence I think the bouce rate is high . .again, no disrespect intended, I'm just giving you one view from an outside sourse

Goldie...

Click to expand...

I appreciate your opinion and am open to new ideas and ways to keep visitors on my site rather than having them bounce. What design and structural changes do you recommend?

You can use tools like PNG Optimizer to optimiez your images. Also, Google around for CSS Optimizer and JavaScript optimizer. That should help improve page load performance.

1 - use /%post-id%/%postname%/ in your permalink settings
2 - Take out some tags from the tag cloud, like half of them
3 - Use wp super-cache
4 - move your DNS to cloudflare(it's free) as another layer of caching/optimization and watch your site load 70% faster

If my tips helped you, i accept bitcoin donations 16nzL3dxKEmXUEKcjMbYLDHYbxr29DHfqc

LOL

yes you need to remove few comments and add more articles day by day it will work smoothly.. by the way you have such nice blog.

thanks

Do you have facebook fan box? Sometimes it make a page load real slow..

bosmolskate said:

I appreciate your opinion and am open to new ideas and ways to keep visitors on my site rather than having them bounce. What design and structural changes do you recommend?

Click to expand...

Sorry I missed this, but was a little busy over the weekend ...

It looks like some adjustments have already been made to the site . .it certainly seems more inviting now than it did the other day ... or am I totally mistaken?

Why not try a nice banner logo at the top of the page to brighten it up a little further? . . the link and the current text could all be added with it .. so you wouldn't lose anything from doing so ..

Respect, Goldie...

There are plenty of plugins available that will supposedly help this problem. There's one in particular that I've heard good things about, but I can't remember the name...I will post later if I remember.

too much plugins also can make your blog work slower, you can also check wordpress "w3 total cache" can help you a lot

Like everyone said, images are the big one, especially ones that aren't on your site. You can reduce an images size by a hell of a lot. A two colour background for example can be a 2-pixel image stretched. Or a gradient fill can be a single pixel gradient line stretched.

Also, WP-Super-Cache so it doesn't hit the database as much every time your page loads

Remove ALL plugins, and time your pageload. There are plugins for firefox that will tell you the page load. Also, some websites that will tell you the pageload time.

You need to get the average pageload time without everything running. Add in the plugins 1 by 1, and test the pageload time each time. Find out the plugin(s) which add a large increase in load time.

Then look at anything embedded on the page (videos, images, banner image, anything other than text!). You need to ensure the images are web ready, meaning they are good/decent looking but small compressed file sizes. Any images which are large should be hosted elsewhere (such as Amazon S3). Also, videos can be hosted on Amazon as well. Hosting images/videos or anything large on Amazon S3 will help out a lot!

Find the culprit causing your bad pageload time, and either compress it or host it on Amazon S3.

shudogg said:

Remove ALL plugins, and time your pageload. There are plugins for firefox that will tell you the page load. Also, some websites that will tell you the pageload time.

You need to get the average pageload time without everything running. Add in the plugins 1 by 1, and test the pageload time each time. Find out the plugin(s) which add a large increase in load time.

Then look at anything embedded on the page (videos, images, banner image, anything other than text!). You need to ensure the images are web ready, meaning they are good/decent looking but small compressed file sizes. Any images which are large should be hosted elsewhere (such as Amazon S3). Also, videos can be hosted on Amazon as well. Hosting images/videos or anything large on Amazon S3 will help out a lot!

Find the culprit causing your bad pageload time, and either compress it or host it on Amazon S3.

Click to expand...

Thanks!!

I will try it out. For now, the reason I found was for using the facebook fan box...

Your not getting a terrible score in Google Page Speed or Yahoo YSlow, but you should check with them, there are bits you could to still optimase on your site.

You might just have shit hosting though?

1. use w3 total cache
2. use minify (not the one coming with w3 total cache)
3. use smush.it

4. visit this site http://gtmetrix.com/
5. do what they say here http://gtmetrix.com/wordpress-optimization-guide.html

The real problem is now when I run the website in Internet Explorer it cuts off the text.

This only happens on the individual posts, not the homepage or individual pages.

Very strange.

If anyone can help solve this I would greatly appreciate it!

THANKS!!!!

Edge match has some good suggestions, but you can take it a lot further.

W3TC is definitely the way to go, super cache if your on a bunch of sites and just want a boost, but if the site is important, always go W3TC. Most people unfortunately do not configure W3TC well and can dramatically effect your results.

You need to have an OPCode to get a real advantage of W3TC over supercache, this allows you to use memory to cache objects. This gives you the most significant boosts.

Cloudflare is also another must have, this will dramatically reduce the garbage visitors to your site, decrease your bounce rate, provide a lot more security, and a significant increase in performance. It also has some CDN functionality in it as well, if you really have as lot of media (images and so on), I would suggest using a CDN like MaxCDN or something which will plug right into W3TC and give you a huge boost in performance.

But it all starts with quality hosting, using a shared host you will never get anything great. VPS is a good area to be for performance, and only look at good providers like LiquidWeb, ServInt, WiredTree. This right here could be all you need to do, but you would greatly benefit with the other things.

Smush.IT is awesome, highly recommend it for images.

Minify is kind of buggy in the current versions of W3TC, I was told the next version should iron that out, but CloudFlare can do minify as well. Keep in mind though Minify can introduce CSS & JS errors in a small but significant percentage of sites. I have a few sites that break with Minify and have to manually chose what files to minify.