How to Fix Bluehost Slow WordPress Websites?

If you have a WordPress site hosted on Bluehost, you may have noticed that it’s become slow and unresponsive. In this article, we will provide some tips on how to fix a slow Bluehost WordPress site.

Steps to Fix Slow Bluehost Sites

1. Enable Bluehost Caching

We can start with the most basic settings to fix the slow loading Bluehost WordPress site. Bluehost comes with built-in caching functionality.

Click the “Bluehost” option in the left side menu options and click on “Settings.” Scroll to the bottom and check the performance tab. You must check if it’s enabled in the WordPress dashboard.

You can experiment with the three available caching levels based on your site type. You can choose between Assets Only, Assets & Web Pages, and Assets & Web Pages – Extended.

The cache setting is also available in the Bluehost Control panel. Login into the panel through my.Bluehost.com and click on “My Websites.”

Then, head over to the “Performance” Tab and confirm the Caching is Active for your site. Choose the best caching control option for Ecommerce, Blog, or Portfolio types of sites.

2. Use Cloudflare CDN

The next best thing you can do is use Cloudflare CDN. Cloudflare comes with a vast global content delivery network across over 100 countries. Besides, the CDN has different performance optimization options, such as static content caching, script minification, gzip compression, and image optimization.

Cloudflare serves the static version of your site to your target audience from the closest server, ensuring high content delivery speed.

3. Use Premium Caching Plugin

Even though enabling the Bluehost Caching and Cloudflare CDN will improve your slow Bluehost WordPress site to some extent, using a premium caching plugin can drastically improve the slow loading speed, as the premium caching plugins have more speed optimization options.

WP Rocket is one of the finest premium WordPress caching plugins. The plugin comes with the most powerful solution to boost loading time, improve PageSpeed score, and optimize the Core Web Vitals of your WordPress website.

4. Remove unwanted & slow load plugins.

While WordPress plugins effectively extend the functionalities of your WordPress dashboard, unwanted and slow-loading plugins can get your site pretty heavy, which will also impact the site loading. The difference is reflected in the Core Web Vitals metrics like Largest Contentful Paint.

The easiest way to check it is by scanning your site URL with Gtmetrix. Next up, you need to check the waterfall tab and determine which files take more time to load. If that’s a plugin, you can either remove it or replace it with a better one.

After removing or replacing one such plugin, you must scan your site with Gtmetrix once again and see if that fixes Bluehost slow WordPress. In most cases, this should improve the slow loading Bluehost WordPress site.

5. Remove unused CSS & JS.

Unused CSS and JS can make your website heavy and causes the WordPress to slow. Most WordPress sites experiencing slow loading have unused CSS and JS as one of the leading causes. CSS and JS load on all pages in WordPress sites even when there is no need. That’s why it’s always wise to load the CSS and JS only when needed.

Almost all WordPress users use a table plugin at one point or the other. However, what’s important to understand is that as you create tables using a table plugin such as TablePress, the TablePress script loads on every page, including your Homepage. Hence, you can prevent the script from loading on pages wherein you don’t need it to load. You can do it using a paid WordPress plugin, PerfMatters, or WP Asset Clean Up, a free alternative.

Both the plugins work pretty much the same way. You can get to any page and click on the Script Manager in the top bar (In the case of PerfMatters). Over there, you will get an option to disable the unused scripts for that page. You can do the same for the pages that don’t need the table script to load, and you should see an impressive improvement in the Core Web Vitals in just a few days.

6. Compress & optimize image delivery

Unoptimized images can slow down your site’s loading speed to a large extent. Images must be compressed and delivered in adaptive sizes based on users’ devices. Besides, converting images in WebP format can boost your site speed drastically.

Even though many website owners may think that using a CDN would address this issue, it doesn’t work that way, or I should say CDNs don’t put enough emphasis on image optimization.

Fortunately, WordPress plugins such as WP Compress work out of the box in optimizing images. The plugin compresses and delivers adaptive images through combined Google CDN and BunnyCDN.

Those who don’t want to use an image CDN can use WebP format for images, which will get the images on a website 20x lighter than PNG. You can easily find many free image optimization plugins in the WordPress repository.

7. Delay JavaScript Execution

Delay JavaScript Execution is a powerful feature that WP Rocket comes with. It delays loading certain JavaScripts that aren’t needed to load in the initial time.

For example, when a visitor visits your website or a webpage, you may not need your website to load live chat widgets, Analytics scripts, or Facebook pixels. However, these scripts would be loaded just when visitors get to the middle of the page. This can unimaginably improve the Largest Contentful Paint score and the overall site loading speed.

8. Prefetch DNS Requests

Another excellent way of boosting your WordPress website speed is Prefetch DNS Requests and what it does is make the site’s external files load faster, especially on mobile networks. WP Rocket comes with a seamless Preload feature.

Users can Enable “Activate sitemap-based caching preloading,” and WP Rocket will automatically find your website’s sitemap. However, it’s only possible in WP Rocket if you use SEO plugins like Yoast or Rank Math. If you don’t use any of these plugins, you can manually enter the sitemap URL in the text box.

If you are wondering what to add under the Prefetch DNS request, you can add Google analytics, fonts, and other external requests.

9. Use PerfMatters to speed up WordPress

Perfmatters is a lightweight WordPress performance plugin that can unimaginably speed up your site. The plugin comes with an easy setup and improves the speed of sites by reducing HTTP requests, disabling plugins, stripping our code, and optimizing databases.

Most importantly, the plugin is not bloated and uses clean and lightweight code with no JavaScript on the front end of your site. Further, PerfMatters can be used alongside other caching plugins.

10. Bouns: Use NitroPack to improve the site speed automatically

NitroPack is an all-speed optimization solution. NitroPack is available as a WordPress plugin. The plugin uses cloud-based performance optimization techniques, and its salient features comprise an advanced caching mechanism, image optimization, built-in global CDN, and script modification.

Enabling NitroPack on your site can drastically improve the Largest Contentful Paint. Even though NitroPack has paid plans, the Free plan is great for new websites. You can certainly give it a try without paying a single penny.

However, Bluehost Basic or Plus is not a great option to use with NitroPack. Try them if you have Choice Plus or Pro plan.

Conclusion

In conclusion, if your WordPress site is hosted on Bluehost and is running slow, try the above speed optimization techniques to speed up your slow loading WordPress site. Before you start trying out the different optimizations I discussed in this post, you must take a backup of your site.