Troubleshooting Guide: Fix Common WordPress Performance Issues

Even the best websites can occasionally run into WordPress performance issues. These can frustrate visitors and harm search engine rankings. This troubleshooting guide will show you some of the most common issues behind slow WordPress sites and give you the solutions to them so you can maintain and increase your site and WordPress Hosting speed and responsiveness. Whether you’re dealing with slow page load times, high server resource usage, or frequent error messages, you’ll be able to diagnose the problem and apply the right fixes, so they don’t happen again.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Addressing WordPress performance issues can improve your user experience, and search engine rankings and increase conversions.
• Accurately diagnosing performance issues and identifying WordPress errors is the first step in effective troubleshooting and maintaining site stability.
• Correctly managing your plugins and themes can avoid conflicts, reduce server load, and improve site speed.
• Regular database maintenance and optimization to reduce data bloat and troubleshoot errors are essential for keeping your WordPress site running smoothly.
• Optimizing your site’s images with compression, lazy loading, and resizing can lead to faster page loads and improved user experience.
• Effective caching strategies can dramatically reduce load times and server resource usage while helping fix errors.
• Maintaining proper file system permissions and a healthy .htaccess file is essential for a smooth-running WordPress website.

What Are WordPress Performance Issues?

WordPress performance issues are any factors that negatively impact the speed, responsiveness, or efficiency of your website. These issues can include slow page loading, longer server response times, frequent timeouts, database connection errors, excessive resource (CPU, RAM, storage space) usage, and overall unusual site behavior

The causes of performance issues can range from poorly optimized images and inefficient databases to WordPress hosting server configuration problems and the overuse of plugins and themes. These can all result in a poor user experience.

Why Site Performance is Important

Fast-loading websites give a better user experience, resulting in higher engagement, longer time spent on your site, more repeat visits, and potentially higher conversion rates. Conversely, slow pages often have higher bounce rates as users become impatient and leave before the content loads. Fast sites usually have lower bounce rates and more page views per session.

Google and other search engines consider site speed as a ranking factor in SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Well-performing websites tend to rank higher in search results, potentially increasing organic traffic thanks to more visibility.

Lastly, a speedy, responsive site helps contribute to a positive brand reputation, conveying professionalism and attention to detail and giving an edge over slower competitors

Identifying WordPress Performance Issues and Errors

The first step to effectively addressing performance issues and errors is correctly identifying them. This involves analyzing WordPress speed speed, knowing the common symptoms, and understanding errors.

Common WordPress Performance Issue Symptoms

• Slow Page Loading: A general rule is that anything above 3 seconds is a slow page loading time.
• Slow Image Loading: Large, unoptimized images can slow down page load times.
• Delayed Server Response Time: This indicates issues in how the server processes requests.
• High TTFB: TTFB (Time to First Byte) measures the time it takes for the server to start sending data, reflecting server-side issues.
• Database Connection Errors: These can indicate your WordPress database is overloaded or has configuration problems.

One of the easiest ways to diagnose and fix WordPress performance issues use speed testing tools like Google PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix. These analyze your site’s performance and provide reports and recommendations for improvement. Additionally, GTmetrix offers waterfall charts that visually represent the breakdown of your page load time.

Pingdom uses speed tests from different global locations. This helps you understand how your website performs for users in different areas.

When troubleshooting errors, WordPress itself offers built-in tools to help you. Enabling WP_DEBUG mode in the wp-config.php file lets you display error messages on-screen or save them to a log file for further analysis. This provides information about the source of the problem. 

For more in-depth troubleshooting, you can access your server’s error logs through cPanel. These logs contain more detailed information about errors that may be occurring on your server.

By analyzing the PHP and MySQL error logs, you can identify script and database errors. If you have access, server software like Apache or Nginx error logs can show server-level issues.

Common Types of Error

Error Establishing a Database Connection

This error signals not being able to connect to your WordPress database. Common causes include Incorrect database credentials (username, password, hostname) in your `wp-config.php` file. Double-check these details for typos or check with your host. Alternatively, if your database server is overloaded, experiencing high traffic or resource limitations, it might temporarily refuse connections. 

Internal Server Error (500 Error)

This generic error message indicates a server issue preventing your website from working properly. For example, WordPress and plugins require a certain amount of memory to run. If the PHP memory limit on your server is too low, it can trigger this error. You can increase the memory limit in your WordPress hosting server configuration to fix this.

Maximum Execution Time Exceeded

This error happens when a script on your site takes longer than the allocated time limit to execute. Scripts can be part of plugins, themes, or even core WordPress functions. You can increase the maximum execution time, however, extending it too much can impact server performance. It’s generally recommended to optimize the script itself for faster execution if you have the technical knowledge or speak to your hosting provider. 

White Screen of Death (WSOD):

White screen errors can prevent any content from loading resulting in a blank screen being displayed instead of your website. These errors are often caused by PHP problems or theme/plugin conflicts.

Memory Limit Errors:

Insufficient server memory to handle resource-intensive tasks.  WordPress and plugins rely on server memory to function. If your server doesn’t have enough memory allocated, you might encounter these errors and need to upgrade your limit or hosting plan.

Syntax Errors

These are mistakes in code that prevent it from running correctly.  These errors can occur in plugins, themes, or even custom code you’ve implemented on your site. Syntax errors typically generate more specific error messages in your server logs that can help pinpoint the exact location of the problem in the code.

Themes and Plugins Issues

Plugins and themes are a common cause of WordPress problems, leading to issues such as site crashes, slow loading times, and broken functionality.

Plugins

First, if you suspect a plugin is causing an issue, use performance monitoring tools or your hosting control panel for server resource usage. Look for spikes when plugins are active.

Next, outdated plugins can cause conflicts. Regularly check for updates and install them promptly to ensure compatibility with your WordPress version. Updated plugins often address known issues and improve overall compatibility.

If updating doesn’t fix the issue, look for alternative plugins that have similar functionality with good user reviews, frequent updates, and reliable support. These indicate a well-maintained plugin, that is less likely to cause future conflicts. Alternatively, use built-in WordPress features like menus and widgets instead of separate plugins.

Themes

Themes can lead to errors such as broken layouts, missing content, or styling issues. To troubleshoot theme-related errors, switch to a default WordPress theme like Twenty Twenty-One and observe if the problem persists.

Use lightweight themes with clean, efficient code and minimal reliance on large framework themes that use native WordPress functions over custom ones. This ensures better compatibility and potentially faster performance.

If you suspect that a theme is causing issues on your WordPress site, consider switching to a default theme like Twenty Twenty-One. By using a default theme, you can isolate and troubleshoot theme-related issues.

If switching themes doesn’t resolve the issue, the next step is to refresh the permalink structure. Permalinks are the permanent URLs that point to specific posts, pages, or other content. They play a vital role in both user navigation and SEO, as they define the structure of your website’s URLs. Sometimes, discrepancies in the permalink settings can lead to errors in displaying content correctly. By refreshing the permalink structure, you can ensure that the URLs are properly configured, which may resolve the theme-related problem.

To troubleshoot theme and plugin conflicts, deactivate all plugins and themes, then reactivate them one by one to identify the specific one causing the issue. This method helps isolate the problem and allows you to resolve conflicts effectively.

Keeping your plugins and themes up to date helps prevent conflicts and ensure performance and security for your WordPress site. Regularly updating plugins and themes not only resolves known issues and vulnerabilities but also enhances your website’s overall performance and user experience.

Lastly, regularly review your installed plugins and themes and remove unused ones to minimize clutter and potential conflicts.

Database Performance Issues

A healthy WordPress database is how you keep your website running smoothly. Here are some WordPress database optimization techniques to troubleshoot and maintain it. Regular database optimization can improve your website’s performance. This includes removing unused revisions of posts, drafts, spam comments, and data from uninstalled plugins.

Several WordPress plugins can automate this process. Optimizing tables is a process that rebuilds and reorganizes database tables to improve query efficiency. You can find plugins that handle table optimization as well.

Verify Credentials

The next step is to double-check the database credentials (username, password, hostname) in your wp-config.php file. These should match the information provided by your hosting provider. Mismatched credentials can lead to connection errors and prevent your site from accessing the database.

Repairing Corrupted Tables

While phpMyAdmin can help manage your database, directly repairing corrupt tables is a delicate operation and should be done carefully and is recommended for advanced users. Incorrect repairs can potentially damage your database further. If you suspect corrupt tables, it’s recommended to back up your database before attempting this.

Like with any changes to your site, back up your database before attempting any of the above. This creates a safety net in case of unforeseen problems.

Unoptimized Images

Images are often a major contributor to slow websites, and optimizing them is essential for improving WordPress performance. Properly optimized images can significantly decrease page load times and conserve bandwidth, leading to a better user experience.

Compression

There are two main compression approaches: lossless and lossy. Lossless compression reduces file size without sacrificing image quality, but the reduction may be minimal. Lossy compression offers greater file size reduction, but there may be some slight quality loss, often imperceptible to the human eye.

You can use tools like TinyPNG or ImageOptim for lossless compression. For automated compression in WordPress, consider plugins like Smush or ShortPixel. These plugins can compress images during upload or bulk optimize existing ones.

Format Selection

Using the right format is the first part of optimizing your website’s images for better performance and loading.

• JPEG: The ideal format for photographs and complex images with many colors. JPEG uses lossy compression, so find a balance between image quality and file size.
• PNG: A good choice for graphics with transparency or flat colors that use a limited color palette. PNG uses lossless compression, resulting in larger file sizes compared to JPEG.
• WebP: A newer format offering better compression and quality. However, WebP has limitations in browser support. Use a plugin to convert images to WebP and serve them to compatible browsers while having a fallback for unsupported ones.

Resizing Images

Scale images to the largest size they’ll be displayed on your website. Uploading larger-than-needed images wastes bandwidth and increases load times. When uploading images, WordPress allows you to create different-sized thumbnails automatically. This eliminates the need to manually create multiple versions of the same image.

Lazy Loading

Implement lazy loading to defer the loading of images outside the viewport (the visible area of the web page). This ensures that critical content like images and above-the-fold elements load first, improving perceived performance.

WordPress Caching

Different types of WordPress caching strategies can be implemented on your website, each serving a specific purpose to help with performance.

Browser Caching: This type of caching instructs the user’s web browser to store frequently accessed information like images, stylesheets, and scripts locally. This reduces the amount of data the browser needs to download on subsequent visits, leading to faster loading times.

Page Caching: This involves storing a complete snapshot of your website’s pages on the server. When a visitor requests a page, the server can deliver the pre-rendered version from the cache instead of regenerating it each time,  improving performance for static content.

Object Caching: An advanced method that focuses on caching individual elements of your website, such as database queries. By storing these in memory, the server can retrieve them quickly without needing to re-generate them for each request, further improving performance for dynamic content.

Cache Management

Caches can sometimes cause unexpected errors on your WordPress site. Clearing caches, both on your browser and on any caching plugins you may be using, can help resolve issues related to outdated or corrupted cache files.

Caches are temporary storage locations that hold website data to improve loading times for returning visitors. While caching is generally beneficial, outdated or corrupted cache files can sometimes lead to unexpected errors on your WordPress site such as seeing outdated content on an older version of your website even after making changes.

Cached stylesheets or layout files might not reflect recent changes resulting in broken layouts or styles. Outdated cached scripts can lead to unexpected behavior or errors. To address these issues, you can clear caches at two levels. Most web browsers have built-in options to clear cache and browsing data. This removes cached website files stored on your local computer.

Next, many WordPress plugins offer caching functionality to improve website performance. These plugins typically come with options to clear the cache stored on your server. Clearing caches might be helpful after making significant changes to your website’s design, layout, or content. Additionally, it can help when troubleshooting errors or unexpected behavior that might be related to outdated cached data.

Fixing File System Issues

Incorrect file permissions can prevent WordPress from accessing or modifying files, leading to errors. It’s important to note that manually editing file permissions can be risky if done incorrectly.  Here are two recommended approaches:

Many hosting providers offer tools, such as a File Manager, in their control panels to manage file permissions for your website.  This is often the safest approach for beginners. 

If your hosting provider doesn’t offer a built-in tool, you can use a File Transfer Protocol (FTP) client to adjust permissions. However, exercise caution and ensure you understand the proper permissions before making changes.  The recommended permissions for WordPress directories are 755 and 644 for files.

The .htaccess file manages server configuration for your WordPress directory. Corruption or misconfigurations in this file can cause WordPress problems.

A simple fix is to rename the existing .htaccess file and access your WordPress dashboard.  To do this, navigate to Settings, then Permalinks. Rename the file and click Save Changes. This will generate a new, default .htaccess file.

While not directly related to file system permissions or the .htaccess file, clearing the cache can sometimes help resolve issues that appear to be file system-related. Corrupted cached data can occasionally lead to unexpected behavior.  Consider clearing caches after making significant changes to your website or troubleshooting errors.

If you’re uncomfortable with manually adjusting file permissions, it’s recommended to get assistance from your hosting provider. Always test these changes in a WordPress staging site before making them live on your main website.

FAQs

Other Blogs of Interest:

– WordPress Image Optimization Techniques for Faster Loading

– Effective Use of WordPress Performance Plugins

– Load Balancing for WordPress Hosting Performance

– WordPress Hosting Server Configurations for Improved Speed

– WordPress Performance Tuning for eCommerce Sites