Peace Akinola

Jun 04, 2025

What makes your WordPress site so slow?

The problem of WordPress website speed is a problem encountered by many people. But what caused the website to be so slow? It is a problem that many people cannot solve. Some people even gave up WordPress, the world's most popular website system. The following points are combined with years of research to analyze the reasons for the slow establishment of the WP theme. To optimize WordPress website performance, it is essential to understand the factors that cause the website to be slow.

The main factors that cause the WordPress website to be slow:

Website Hosting

To ensure optimal performance and compatibility, a host running a WordPress website should meet the officially recommended hosting requirements:

While WordPress can technically run on older environments (as low as PHP 5.6.20 and MySQL 5.0), these are not recommended due to security and performance limitations.

Whether using Apache or Nginx, it’s also recommended that the hosting environment supports URL rewriting modules (such as mod_rewrite for Apache) to enable pretty permalinks. However, this is not a strict requirement.

Why is it better to meet the recommended configuration?

PHP 8.1 or higher is strongly recommended for running WordPress, as it offers significant performance and security improvements over previous versions. While older versions like PHP 7.4 are still supported by WordPress, they are no longer actively maintained and should be avoided if possible.

Additionally, WordPress now uses utf8mb4 encoding by default to support full Unicode, including emojis and special characters. To take full advantage of this, it is recommended to use MySQL 5.7 or higher, or MariaDB 10.4 or higher, as these versions provide better and more complete support for utf8mb4.

WordPress configuration

Here mainly talk about website caching issues. Because every page of WordPress needs to be queried from the database, if streak directly, it will increase the burden on the host. So, install a cache plugin. Cache to CDN when necessary.

Page size

This is mainly because the images are not well optimized for the web. Some companies directly upload the photos taken on the Internet, which is not a good practice.

Bad plugin or theme

If the code of a plugin or theme is not standardized or optimized, it will also slow down the website.

External scripts

External scripts, such as advertisements and font loading, can affect website performance.