Several WordPress websites I manage became slow to load after several months. Fortunately, there are several good tools out there for analyzing where the loading time is going. Here are the main activities during a web page load:
- Connect. The web browser is connecting to the server
- Send. The web browser is sending data to the server
- Wait. The web browser is waiting for data from the server
- Receive. The web browser is receiving data from the server
If all your time is spent trying to connect to the server, then you may have a hosting issue. You can call your hosting company to find out about any known server problems. Avoid being talked into upgrading your account. The economy category should still have a good response time for simple websites.
Perhaps you have added many sliders over the months – in high resolution – and they are bogging down the entire site. This will show up as long receive times. Go back and choose only the slider photos that have the most impact on your audience. Resize the slider photos down to the correct size before uploading to WordPress.
One of the problems I saw was with social media sharing WordPress plugins. The AddThis plugins in particular had a high overhead with many many requests to the server. Each request was quick but there were so many. The website loaded significantly faster when this plugin was deactivated.
The Carousel Horizontal Posts Content Slider was another plugin with too much of a server load for what we were getting. It was at the bottom of the We Save Lives home page and rotated about 20 partner images. But it was bogging down the home page load. Again we saw a good speed increase with this deactivated.
We Save Lives had gone though some major changes with their website. Their loading process also included several javascript files that were not being used anywhere. A quick fix to save some loading time and clean up the process.
Caching plugins also speed up a site load. But before you install those, take some time to see what is really happening when your site loads.