Site is slow
A slow site is usually caused by something in WordPress itself - a heavy plugin, an uncached page, or a slow external service - rather than the hosting environment. Work through the causes below to narrow it down.
Common causes
- Pages aren't being cached. Templ caches your pages so repeat visits are served quickly. Logged-in traffic, carts, and other personalised or dynamic pages bypass the cache by design, so they're always slower than cached pages. If normally-cacheable pages are slow, a plugin may be preventing caching.
- A heavy or misbehaving plugin. Page builders, related-posts widgets, and analytics plugins can add significant load. Deactivate plugins and themes to isolate the culprit - if the site is fast again, reactivate them one by one to find the slow one.
- Slow external calls. If your site calls an external API on each page load (for example a live feed or a third-party font/script), it's only as fast as that service. Cache the results or remove the dependency.
- Large, unoptimised images. Uploading full-resolution images and displaying them scaled down forces visitors to download far more than they need. Resize and compress images before uploading.
- An outdated PHP version. Newer PHP versions are significantly faster. Make sure your site runs a current, supported version.
Measure before and after
Use a tool like PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix to measure load time, so you can tell whether each change actually helped.
If your site is still slow after working through these, Templ offers a paid speed optimization service where we do a full optimization for you.