Does your WordPress website page load speed seem like it’s using dial-up? Is your website running at the pace of an inebriated sloth?
One of the most common WordPress support questions we receive involves page load speed. And the primary culprits for the slow page load speed are almost always a) unnecessary WordPress plugins and b) large photos files. This post will address the first issue.
As a general rule, you want to have less than a dozen enabled plugins on your website. Any time you will be installing a plugin, you need to ask yourself: Is this plugin necessary? Is this plugin worth having a slower website or is there some better way to accomplish the same thing?
How do you tell what plugins are installed on your WordPress website? Simply click on the Plugins section on the left hand menu. There you will see a list of all the plugins you have installed.
Now let’s say that you didn’t know this and you have already installed a bunch of plugins, what do you do? You can simply deactivate the plugins you think you don’t need. Then you can test your site to make sure that it’s not needed before you delete it. As an important side note: some poorly written plugins will not save settings when they are disabled and re-enabled, which means you have to set up the plugin again after turning it off and back on. This isn’t the case for most plugins, but does happen on some and can be frustrating.
Normally having a disabled plugin does not impact page load speed, so keeping a disabled plugin around while you make sure you don’t need it shouldn’t be an issue. However, it can impact the size of space you need for hosting, so once you have identified you don’t need a specific plugin you should delete it.
In the next post we will cover how to manage your image size to improve page load speed.