If your WordPress site used to run well, and over time it got slower and slower until now it’s just unbearable, it could very well be your fault. And here’s why…

As you become familiar with WordPress and get comfortable running your own website, you will also start doing things to it that will unwittingly slow it down.

Most single website owners host on shared hosting. This means that your website is sharing resources with a bunch of other websites on the same server. This is why it’s so affordable Most times you don’t need much more than that, but it is important to understand that different hosting plans have a different allotment of resources, and that shared hosting provides you with the least. Shared hosting will run the average website just fine, but it won’t run any and everything. It’s important that you don’t bog it down with a bunch of unnecessary stuff.

Here are some common sense tips that you can trouble shoot on your own, and may help you speed up your WordPress website

You are running too many plug ins.

This is the main problem when people come to me and tell me that their site is running slow.

The more you learn about WordPress’ plug in architecture, the more you will find that there is a plug in for almost everything. It’s easy to get caught up in trying to put every available bell and whistle on your site, many of which haven’t been trendy or necessary since the early 90′s….they’re just new to you.

I’ve seen sites running as many as 40 plug ins or more. In most cases, that is ridiculous.

SEO plug ins and plug ins that claim will help build links, attract traffic, and give you an advantage over other websites, are also overused. While there are a few that I think you should use, you definitely don’t need all of them. Plug ins that change the way WordPress functions (such as changing your URL structure to add .html on the end of your links for no reason), add a bunch of unnecessary redirects and other things that could have been done with some simple HTML knowledge will slow your site down tremendously.

WordPress works great out of the box. There are no miracle plug ins out there that will make your site #1 in Google. Use them sparingly and only if you really understand why you are using them, and how to use them.

You can check the performance issues due to plug ins with ( amazingly enough) another plug in:

P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler)

This plugin creates a profile of your WordPress site’s plugins’ performance by measuring their impact on your site’s load time. Often times, WordPress sites load slowly because of poorly configured plugins or because there are so many of them. By using the P3 plugin, you can narrow down anything causing slowness on your site: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/p3-profiler/

Beware Ads, Twitter, Facebook, and RSS plug ins

Anytime you add something to your site that relies on another site to deliver the content, you are now at the mercy of that other site’s performance. Social Media Widgets. Ads and RSS feeds are pulling content from another source. If that source is running slow, or even not at all, then your site will struggle to load because it’s looking for that information. This includes media files. Although sometimes the page will load anyway, minus that particular module or content, it will still slow it down before it decides to skip it.

Beware Free Themes

If you are a do it yourselfer running WordPress, it goes without saying that you should stay away from free themes unless you COMPLETELY trust the source. The WordPress theme repository is one source that you can trust.

Just like free music downloads and movie sites, many 3rd party free theme sites are just irresistible apples on the tree that serve only one purpose, to infect your website, computer or server with malware, viruses and other malicious scripts to use your computer or website as a proxy, ad portal, or as another place to stick links or run identity theft keyloggers and spywawre.

I could go into great lengths explaining this, but fortunately Siobhan McKeown at WPMU has done a great job of investigative reporting to explain it much better: http://wpmu.org/why-you-should-never-search-for-free-wordpress-themes-in-google-or-anywhere-else/

Beware of bad HTML or other coding mistakes

As they say, “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing”. Inevitably you will learn more and more about using short codes, and snippets of HTML on your website. One of the biggest offenders of a slow loading or poorly displaying site is not using code properly. Specifically missing closing tags. Forgetting a closing tag is one of the most common offenses that will screw your site up.

When making coding changes or attempting something new, always make a back up of the original version just in case you need to restore it or refer to it to fix any mistakes. You will never know so much that you don’t need to back up.

You can check to see if your site has coding errors by using W3 Markup Validator:
http://validator.w3.org/.
But use with a grain of salt. It’s not perfect. Rarely have I ever seen a site come back 100% clean. Even the most well known websites come back with some reported errors. It doesn’t always mean that those are the culprits, but if you return a lot of results, it’s worth  double checking to see if what it says is valid.

Check your email configuration

I recently had a client who’s website kept shutting down with a 500 Internal Server Error. This is an error that you will see if the server or database has timed out or has shut down. In this particular instance, it was the company’s  Mac mail configuration that was using up all of the resources.

Their shared hosting account allows for 25 connections at a time. Their emails were set to look for incoming emails every 2 seconds. So at any given time, they were making 26 connection requests, which left nothing for the website and consequently, it kept shutting down. When it was up,  it loaded very slow. This is something that you can handle with your host. They should be able to tell you if there are any abnormal resource problems with your site on their end.

Use a cache plug in

Cache plug ins work by storing and returning the most recent version of your site’s pages when requests are made, for faster load times.

W3 Total Cache: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/w3-total-cache/
Wp-Super Cache: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-super-cache/

…are 2 of the most popular ones. When in doubt, ask your host. They may recommend specific cache plug ins based on what works best with their server configuration. Most will even offer you assistance to insure that you have the correct settings.

Call someone

These aren’t the only reasons, just the most common. It is possible that you have real problems ranging from just having a crappy host, to needing to upgrade your account to handle an increase in traffic or added functionality.

If you still can’t get to the bottom of the problem, start with your host. They should be able to tell you if there are unusual memory drains or if they themselves are having any issues. If all is well there, I’ll be the first to tell you that they are going to blame it on your plug ins. Even if you aren’t running that many.

Instead of ruining your weekend or pulling your hair out, it may be worth hiring an experienced WordPress Service Provider to troubleshoot the problem. No one can say for sure what your exact issue is without access to your website’s admin section, database and the files. A good troubleshooter can get you up and running in no time.