Debunk 7 Common Myths About WordPress Speed
There has been a lot of talk during the years about website speed, and it is commonly accepted that the speed of your website reflects on the customer experience, which in turn reflects on your Pagerank and increases or decreases your website’s conversion rate. However, there are a lot of myths in circulation surrounding website speed and in particular the speed of the popular content management system WordPress.
The speed performance of WordPress relies on the following major points:
- How streamlined the code of your theme is – Searching on the web for a free WordPress theme is rarely the best way to discover a fast loading and well-coded theme.
- How fast your hosting provider is – One of the easiest ways to score a big hit here is to invest in a fast hosting provider.
- Installing only trustworthy, well coded, and well documented plugins – Since every plugin adds functionality to your website, it also makes your website more complex, which affects its speed.
Not I will attempt to dispel some of the most common WordPress myths. These are as follows:
1. WordPress lacks sufficient speed.
Although it is true that the slow speed of a website is a big disadvantage, to presume that websites using WordPress are slower than those running under another CMS is false. One can make WordPress as fast as he needs it to be. If your website that runs under WordPress is slow, this can be the result of many factors. You could be either flooding your website with many plugins or you may be using a not so good and cheap hosting provider. It may also be the case that your site is slow because of the theme you are using.
2. If you use fewer plugins, website speed will not be an issue.
Injecting an overwhelming number of rich features into your website through a single plugin or two can be very detrimental to your site and can result in more harm than good. It is true that a large number of WordPress plugins will slow your website but a single plugin of low quality can be even more harmful in this respect. Some plugins are even coded by hackers who are looking for an unauthorized access into your website.
3. Inactive plugins are also slowing down your website.
This is quite not so. An inactive plugin has nothing to do with your website’s speed. It is however worth mentioning that an inactive plugin should also be kept up-to-date, as an outdated version of a plugin may pose risk to security.
4. Inactive themes slow down your website.
Just as it is the case with inactive plugins, these do not affect the speed of your website. Make sure they are updated to their most recent version so that they don’t present a security risk.
5. Revisions are slowing a WordPress website.
These have no effect on the speed of a website. Both WordPress and MySQL are clever enough to ignore the number of revisions on the front end of a website. Revisions only affect the available space in a database.
6. The number of plugins is the single thing that affects website speed the most.
If fact, it is the quality of plugins and not their quantity that affects the speed of a website the most. When people claim that using fewer in number plugins will boost the speed of a website, this is not necessarily 100 per cent true. Usually it is a single plugin that increases our pageload time because it either uses a lot of scripts or its database requests are not optimized.
If you believe that your site is slow because of a particular plugin, you don’t need to be a hardcore developer to determine whether that is true. You can just deactivate all of your plugins from the dashboard of your website and examine whether this impacts performance. If your website starts to load much faster as a result, try to activate the plugins one by one in order to discover which one causes the problem. Once you discover the culprit, it is only a matter of finding a suitable replacement.
7. Keeping a lot of trash or not emptying your trash bin brings your website speed down.
While it is true that the trash takes up more space, it has no effect on the speed of your website.
Although all of these claims are clearly not true, the CMS has room for improvement in terms of speed. You can always look for the perfect solution and try a range of plugins with similar functionalities but affecting your website’s speed differently. Acquiring paid plugins and premium themes is by far the best method for a non-technical person to ensure his site is secure, looks great, and runs fast.
