Troubleshooting Tips: Pinpointing the Root Causes of Fluctuating Website Speeds

Nothing sabotages the user experience quite like a website that loads at glacial speeds. One second your site is zipping along smoothly, and the next it's sputtering slower than a dial-up connection. These frustrating fluctuations not only alienate your visitors, but also directly impact your revenue and search engine visibility.
So what causes these vexing variations in website performance? Like most problems, the culprit typically stems from multiple interconnected issues. By methodically diagnosing and addressing each one, you can transform your sluggish site. Let’s explore some troubleshooting tips to stabilize your site speeds.
Diagnose the Issue
The first step is gathering hard data. After all, feelings and hunches make for poor troubleshooters:
Track Speed Changes with Analytics
Review your site speed history in Google Analytics to identify abnormal changes. For example, you might notice that your homepage load time jumped from 2 seconds to over 8 seconds starting June 12th, then sped back up a week later. Were there any new additions to your website or traffic spikes in this time period? Understanding when fluctuations happened allows you to identify patterns that give you a reference point for further diagnosis.
Conduct Routine Speed Tests
Regularly test your website’s speed using tools like Pingdom or WebPageTest. This allows you to establish a baseline and monitor variations over time. You might find that your site speed consistently tanks during evening hours or plummets on Mondays, which can direct your next steps towards site speed consistency.
Check Speeds from Different Locations and Devices
Website speeds can vary drastically across locations and devices. What loads instantly on your desktop in New York may crawl at a snail’s pace on a mobile phone in Australia. Use VPNs to simulate different countries and check performance on both mobile and desktop to expose these inconsistencies. (If you run a local business, its important to only test from areas your customers live and work in.)
Armed with hard metrics, you can pivot to isolate the root causes behind your site’s fluctuating speeds.
Target Potential Causes
Next up, you have to investigate the root cause of inconsistent speeds:
Check Server-Side Factors
An overburdened server is one of the most common causes of poor website performance. You'll typically notice drastic speed drops during peak traffic hours as the server struggles to meet demand. Upgrading to a more powerful hosting plan with additional computing resources can provide much-needed relief.
Evaluate Network Connectivity
Intermittent network issues like DNS routing problems, insufficient bandwidth, and infrastructure bottlenecks could secretly sabotage your site speed. Run diagnostics tests and consult with your web host to identify and address any network factors limiting performance.
Assess Frontend Website Code and Scripts
Bloated code and unoptimized elements like bulky images, uncondensed videos, and choppy JavaScript files can reduce site speed. Similarly, an outdated or overloaded plugin reaching its limits can choke bandwidth and degrade performance. Boost your speed by streamlining files, implementing compression, and reducing unnecessary bloat.
Consider Traffic Spikes
Sudden traffic spikes from seasonal promotions or viral content can easily overwhelm your server resources, slowing website performance to a crawl. Proactively scaling your web hosting capabilities and optimizing code to handle higher volumes helps counterbalance these periodic traffic tsunamis. You can identify busy seasons by assessing old traffic patterns and planning promotional periods.
Check External Services Status
If your website relies on external services like content delivery networks (CDNs), third-party APIs, or databases, any outages or downtimes from these providers can directly degrade your site's performance. Monitoring status dashboards of these external services allows you to quickly confirm whether any ongoing issues are cascading to your site speed.
Apply Quick Fixes First
While coding wizards could (and should) spend months optimizing websites, quick wins offer the best bang for buck. Let’s explore fast fixes that can provide instant relief:
Clear Caches
Overflowing caches create avoidable bloat. Flushing browser caches and clearing server-side caches lifts an easily resolvable burden on your site speed.
Enable Caching Plugins
Caching plugins store temporary static copies of web assets, reducing server requests. This takes the pressure off overloaded resources. LiteSpeed Cache and WP Rocket are dependable plugins, so consider enabling them for a quicker load time.
Shrink Those Images!
Unoptimized images are notorious performance killers. Use tools like Smush to resize, compress, and optimize your images for faster loads.
Deactivate Unused Plugins
Each plugin adds weight, especially obsolete ones. Get lean by removing unnecessary plugins dragging you down.
Implement Long-Term Solutions
While duct tape solutions provide temporary relief, strategic, long-term investments better prepare you for the battle against fluctuating site speeds.
Upgrade Web Hosting
If routine speed checks reveal your server is consistently buckling under elevated traffic levels, it likely needs an upgrade to meet demands. Transitioning to a more powerful hosting plan with additional computing resources, storage, and bandwidth enables your infrastructure to sustain performance despite growth.
Improve Site Architecture
Optimizing how code loads, deferring non-critical scripts, implementing expiration headers for efficient caching, and eliminating render-blocking elements through better site architecture accelerates page loads. Refining your code structure enhances sustainability.
Refine Code and Scripts
Sloppy, bulky code significantly bogs down website performance. Fine-tuning front-end code by removing duplicate scripts, implementing image lazy loading, optimizing API calls, and eliminating unnecessary bloat improves sustainability despite increasing complexity.
Introduce a CDN
A content delivery network (CDN) stores cached copies of static assets like images, videos, and web fonts across globally distributed servers near your visitors for faster delivery no matter their geography. This expands capacity while stabilizing site speed at scale.
Retest and Continuously Monitor
Of course, rectifying the problem is only half the battle. We also must sustain website speed and prevent future fluctuations:
Confirm Speed Improvements
Validate that your solutions are working by rigorously retesting site speeds from different locations worldwide. Consistent improvements across geographic sampling are an indication of successful improvements.
Conduct Ongoing Speed Checks
Continuously monitoring key site performance metrics allows you to detect deteriorations quickly. Leverage tools providing historical reports to simplify analysis of trends over time.
Set Custom Performance Alerts
Configuring alerts that automatically notify you when website speeds dip below defined thresholds enables swift responses to prevent prolonged performance slowdowns.
Optimization Is Never Done
As your business and website evolve, so must your optimization strategy. Continually refine code, enhance infrastructure, and tune architecture to alleviate reliance upon temporary fixes.
Why Consistent Website Speed Matters to Small Business Owners
Inconsistent website performance directly impacts your revenue, brand perception, and ability to engage customers. Losing even one sale due to poor website speed could negate the financial gains from months of effort. Worse still, lagging speeds degrade user experience, eroding customer trust and loyalty over time. Monitoring and safeguarding website speed provides a competitive advantage that pays continuous dividends.
Final Thoughts
Are you ready to stop losing customers and revenue due to fluctuating website speeds? As specialists in all facets of WordPress sites, Your WP Guy offers customized solutions tailored to your unique needs. Let us monitor and maintain your site’s performance so you can focus on running your business. Schedule a discovery call today and let’s team up to create a stable website that supports your growing business.
Troubleshooting Tips: Pinpointing the Root Causes of Fluctuating Website Speeds Summary
- Identify exactly when and how website speeds are fluctuating using analytics
- Methodically diagnose potential root causes like server limitations, traffic spikes, etc.
- Implement quick fixes like optimizing images, adding caching plugins, etc.
- Make strategic long-term investments to improve site architecture
- Continuously monitor performance and respond swiftly to prevent future slowdowns