Website speed is one of the key factors in determining a website's popularity. As a general recommendation, a page load time should be under two seconds – otherwise, site visitors are more likely to abandon the page.

Several factors can cause your website to go slower. In most cases, it comes down to the following factors:

At Hostinger, we perform regular server maintenance to improve and upgrade our servers, which in some cases, might affect your website’s speed temporarily.

In case your website is suddenly slowed down, check first if there is any ongoing maintenance. If that is the case, you don’t need to do anything – give it a little time until maintenance is over and your website speed will return to normal.

As the distance between you and the server where the website is hosted grows larger, you may expect a longer response time. To solve this, analyze where is your target audience located and choose a server closer to them. You can use our server transfer tool for that 😊

If you still want to improve loading time, or your website is oriented to several locations, you can set up a CDN for your website. It works by keeping multiple copies of your website’s data in proxy servers worldwide, thus improving your website speed for visitors, no matter their physical location.

If the resource usage of your website is high, it will perform slower until the usage decreases. We recommend checking your usage frequently. If it’s constantly high, refer to this article for solutions: Resource Usage shows that hosting plan limits were reached.

Web caching stores frequently accessed data in a server for future reusing, improving speed as it does not need to load all the content every time. A CDN has some caching features that you can take advantage of.

For best results, we recommend leveraging browser cache and, for WordPress websites, using a plugin such as LiteSpeed Cache.

Website optimization is one of the most crucial aspects of your website’s speed. You can analyze your website directly through your panel by using the Page Speed feature.

You can also use external tools for this purpose, such as:

Database optimization can improve the performance and efficiency of a database by minimizing the amount of time and resources required. Some general database optimization recommendations include:

You can also consider further database query optimization practices, such as ensuring only the essential data is queried, limiting the query results, avoiding the use of wildcard characters in queries, and using proper data types.

Since this can be a complex topic, you may require the assistance of a developer before proceeding. You should also take into consideration that some actions may not be available for Web or Cloud plans due to security limitations on database and server privileges.

If you have a VPS plan, you can also consider using specialized tools like EverSQL.

Additional Resources