You need to find out if your site’s loading just fine or not – this is fairly simple to accomplish!
1. PINGDOM
Pingdom is very easy to use and yet extensively comprehensive. For beginners, the summary box provides some useful data such as load time (in seconds), page size, your ranking among other tested sites, and a performance grade. Below said summary box, there’s additional info which specifically shows what’s fast and what’s slowing down your site.
2. GTMETRIX
GTMetrix works like Pingdom but provides even more data. Not only does it show what’s slow, but it even shows if there are errors (bad requests, etc.) which can also slow down your site and/or hinder its performance.
HOW TO DIAGNOSE AND FIX ANY PROBLEMS FOUND IN YOUR SPEED TEST RESULTS
After testing, what should you do with the information? Diagnosis is actually quite easy.
1. POOR HOSTING
Hosting performance is paramount because if the server’s slow then so is your website. If it’s taking too long for your host to respond to the initial request, you might need to look for a different web hosting service.
2. POORLY CODED/BLOATED PLUGINS
Plugins are great as long as they don’t hinder your site’s performance – the “Plugin Performance Profiler” (developed by GoDaddy.com) scans your installed plugins and checks for any site-slowing culprits. You’ll also want to delete any plugins you don’t or no longer use.
3. POORLY CODED THEMES
WordPress Themes do need to be eye-catching but also high-performance; this means you want to be careful about any that have too many styling options and shortcoding. One we recommend that’s feature-rich but does extremely well is “OceanWP”.
5. NOT USING A CDN
Please use CloudFlare. It’s incredibly nimble as a Content Delivery Network, and it starts at the great price of $0.
6. POOR THIRD-PARTY SERVICE
Sometimes your site might have to use Third-Party content (content from another server). This can result in poor performance because, not only is the number of HTTP requests increased, but your site’s dependent on another server to load fast.