Your WordPress site is grinding at an abysmal pace, people are leaving it before even looking at your contents. Google analytics shows a much higher bounce rate and much fewer visitors. Everything is looking hopeless. The site is even offline at times, and those who created and configured your site are long gone, or want a fortune to look at it again.
What can I do?
The first thing you need to do, is to update WordPress and plugins, a lot happens in a year or two. Obviously check the documentation to see if the plugins compatible with the latest version before you start and ensure you have backed up version, if anything goes wrong.
The next thing, is to verify if your site has a cache plugin installed and configured correctly. A cache plugin like W3 Total Cache plugin can make your site up to 50% faster. Finally look at your pictures. Most sites today have lots of images, and by using a plugin like reSmush.it you can compress and reduce image size without noticing any difference.
All this is something that can be solved in a couple of hours, depending on size and complexity. If you have hundreds of posts and images, it will obviously take longer, but most of that time is server time, which doesn’t cost you anything. Worst case, it might be worth to pay for the pro version of the plugin, if you have a massive amount of high res photos, but in the majority of cases, the free version is just fine.
My provider doesn’t understand me…
Once you have optimized your site, and it continues to be slow and unstable, you need to start looking at your provider. What hosting package did you buy? Is your site sitting on a slow shared server? Can you get a better hosting package at a reasonable price? Or is your hosting provider so inflexible, that you cannot add domains to an existing site or buy domains without hosting, slow support etc., Then you should consider changing. Do you have users in different countries? Perhaps you should look at a CDN like Cloudflare, so you content is cached closer to your users, some providers even do that already.
But, I have no idea how to move a site…..
It can be a little complicated, especially if you are trapped at a provider, with a slow server, where even migration plugins like Duplicator give you timeouts. Then you have to do two step migration, backing up the database, copy data via FTP and adapt some plugins directly in the database. If the site is cached, it might be worth emptying it and temporarily disabling it before you migrate, and then enable and configure it again at the new location. You also need to remember rename URLs if you are changing location and domain and ensure redirects are in place for the old domain.
If you know WordPress a little there are plenty of guides out there that can help through the process, and some providers will help you too, but be prepared that that the site may not work 100% at the new location, some plugins may need to be reconfigured or edited in the database. And of course you have a backup of your site before you start doing anything, right….
But, it will probably cost me the same to get a new site…
No, it’s not that bad actually, A new site will cost you between 300 – 1000 Euro, depending whether it is a simple blog or an e-commerce site. A normal site migration we can do for about 80 Euro. If the site is more complex, we are happy to take a look a give you a free quote.
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