There are quite a few things that can make a WordPress site slow to load – the most common of which are plugins, themes or large graphics.

Plugins that need to access other sites for their information (like Share This or Related Sites) can greatly slow down the speed at which your site loads, if the servers they’re running on are slow or down.

I used to get really frustrated with the speed at which this site loaded and the fix really came when I identified and removed all the plugins that accessed other sites.

I covered that in a bit more detail here.

Thesis itself was greatly optimised in version 1.5 – I wrote about that here – it’s near the bottom in the ‘Under The Hood’ section.

Finally WordPress itself was optimised in version 2.7 – and that made a big difference too.

However, my static sites also load more quickly than my WordPress sites simply because they’re static sites – all HTML based and very few calls to the server to get the files to display.

Because WordPress is PHP based, it makes far more calls to the server and, if you have a plugin (even one that doesn’t access external sites) or a theme that’s poorly constructed (makes more calls than necessary to the server) that will slow down your site load time.

I’m talking here, of course, in relation to your static sites which I’m assuming are on the same server. If they’re not on the same server a whole bunch of other issues come into play – such as your relative server performance and the network connections between your server and your client (the PC where you’re viewing the site) and so on.

One way to identify what’s causing your site to load slowly would be to disable one of your plugins and check performance, then reactivate it and disable the next one, and so on. You could also do the same with your theme: disable it and activate the WordPress default theme.

Keep in mind, though, that WordPress will load more slowly than a static site, unless that static site is also based on PHP and has Flash and a whole bunch of other stuff on it that requires lots of server calls.

Cheers,

Martin.

The reason I ask is that Google Webmaster Tools now has a section for checking the average load times for your site.
All my html sites are super fast but my one WordPress site is pretty slow.
What a disappointment after all the hype about wordpress.

I wouldn’t bother but Google is talking about using page load time as one of its metrics.
I’m pleased with the look of my theme but if it’s slow… I have to think of which theme to use on future sites.
.-= Keith Davis´s last blog ..The eyes have it! =-.

Cheers,

Martin.