Straining Your Server? Here’s 6 Tips to Help Lessen the Load on Your WordPress Site’s Server

Has your site been running slower than usual when loading pages or running processes in the WordPress backend? Are simple actions such as adding a user or uploading media taking more time than you’d expect to fully process? Your site may need to be optimized in order to restore the speed and process time you are expecting on your site.

Many quality website hosting services, such as WPEngine, provide their users with methods to measure and track the resource usage on their sites. The key resources you should be looking out for are storage, bandwidth, and visits. By keeping these three in check, we can not only ensure that your site’s processes will be running fine, but we can also ensure the server itself is able to load your site without problem and dedicate the needed resources effectively.

Storage

Remove Unneeded Files & Media

Many, many WordPress sites have lots of media files uploaded to them due to the ease of doing so and the ease of accessing these files across different systems. A problem with a bulk of media files is that it bogs down storage on your website. Depending on your hosting you may have a limit to the data size your site can accommodate, causing overage fees to be accrued should you go over your limit. On top of this, files that are not used on the site and are only used externally such as images for emails should not be kept on the site. Not only does it contribute to the data limit on the site, but loading images on external systems through your site heavily contributes to bandwidth usage and also potentially visits to your site depending on how your host measures visits.

Optimize Remaining Media

After you’ve cleaned excess media out of your site, the next step is to optimize what remains. This primarily consists of resizing and compressing images and PDFs on the site, the most common form of upload to the media library. By doing this, you can further reduce the amount of data storage used on the site and also improve your average bandwidth usage as the files being loaded will take less bandwidth to do so.

Bandwidth

Ensure Files/Media Loaded on Pages is Optimized

As mentioned above, optimizing the files on your site is imperative in order to ensure your site is working optimally. Every page and file loaded on a browser are uploaded to that browser from the server, consuming bandwidth for each file loaded. The larger these files are the more bandwidth is used to transfer them causing unoptimized media to become a problem. If your site’s pages have a large amount of images on them and they are unoptimized, each of these large files need to be uploaded to each user’s browser which would rack up a lot of bandwidth usage quickly. The more bandwidth used at once the less there is for other users visiting the site, causing slower page load speed for other users.

Offload Videos to External Hosting

Videos by their nature are typically very large files and can cause a lot of bandwidth to be consumed on your site. Every time a page with a video or multiple videos loads, all of the videos on it must load as well unless your video player is configured to not load the video file until the play button is clicked. While this is typically the case for video galleries or individual video pages, home hero videos are usually automatically played once the homepage is loaded.

As these are also generally large videos in terms of the amount of the screen space it takes, these files are large even for video standards causing a lot of bandwidth to be used to upload the video to users’ browsers. In these cases it is recommended to offload your videos to an external system such as AWS’ S3 buckets and load it from there. For videos in galleries or individual video pages, video hosting services such as Vimeo or YouTube. Using either custom code or a plugin, you can have YouTube or Vimeo players load the videos on your site utilizing their servers to do so rather than your own saving bandwidth on your own site.

Visits

Control Bot Traffic On Your Site

The bulk of all traffic on the internet, 51% of all traffic in 2024 according to an analysis by cyber security firm Imperva, is now bot driven. Bots are hitting sites more intensely than ever and according to our own work here at PaperStreet a vast majority of bots spamming sites are the legitimate ones. These typically comprise of crawlers from large data brokers or search engines such as Facebook, Google, and Bing but with the rise of generative text AI models AI crawlers such as GPT and Gemini have now also begun hitting sites across the internet.

In an effort to lessen the impact of these crawlers hitting every page of your site you can set rate-limits or completely block them from accessing your site through either a firewall plugin or your server host. The most efficient way to do so is to set rules targeting the bots’ user agents which are typically easy to find through a google search or even through the AI models themselves.

Utilize A CDN

CDNs are utilized in order to offload traffic from your origin server (the server actually hosting your site). This is done by storing copies of the HTML and assets on your site on external servers and loading these assets from here rather than directly from your server. When that happens, fewer requests ever reach your hosting provider which directly reduces the number of billable visits your provider counts. In addition, loading from a CDN’s cached copy of the site often results in faster load times which directly contributes to better ranking scores on google.

Mange Your Server’s Health… It Means a Healthy Website

Overall, its important to manage your server’s health in order to ensure a healthy website. By utilizing the tips above, you can take steps to ensure your site is optimized to prevent slow load times and poor functionality. Questions about hosting or speed? We’ve got you covered. Reach out today to learn more.