Divi Theme Slow Loading? Learn How to Speed it Up

UPDATE: If you are experiencing a really slow Divi backend builder, you should use the Divi Visual Builder. That one is working fine without problems. And if you are using the Visual Builder and it is still slow (or your Divi website doesn’t load fast), follow my steps below:

I often see the question on how to make the Divi theme load faster in Divi Facebook groups, so I’ve decided to write a blog post on this topic. And I’ve decided so, because I have not experienced this problem so far (luckily).

 

 

The #1 solution to this problem is to use fast web hosting. If you have a decent web host that has fast servers, your Divi website should load in under 2 seconds, like mine does. If you wonder which web hosting company I’m using, it is SiteGround. This web host is also recommended by WordPress.org and is really popular among Divi users.  It is an official Divi web host recommended by Elegant Themes too.

Yes, of course there are other factors as well, but the main factor of Divi slow loading is your web hosting provider. My website always loads in around 1.1 seconds – check my Pingdom screenshot below (you can check your website’s loading time on Pingdom, too) and I’m not using any caching plugins, nor any CDN service, because I’m fine with 1.1 sec loading time (Google recommends a <2 sec loading time). Also, I prefer not to use caching plugins or Clouflare if I don’t have to. If you want, you can of course use them and then also feel free to let me know in the comments below what loading time will you have achieved. I believe if I used them, too, I could maybe reach a loading time in the range of 0.5 – 0.75 seconds. But as I said, I currently don’t need this, as I want to keep the number of plugins used on my site at minimum in order to don’t over-complicate things. More plugins just cause more troubles.

 

Divi theme + SiteGround hosting

 

There are some other Divi theme speed up tips, too. For example, if you have many images on your website and if those images are not optimized for web. This could be slowing down your website pretty much. You should always try to make your images to have not more than 350kb and be not bigger than 1920 x 1280 pixels. If you use Photoshop, you can use the “Save for web” feature and set the quality of your .jpg image to 60 – 75%. Or save it as a .gif if it doesn’t have many colors. Or if you don’t have Photoshop you can use a plugin like e.g. Imagify or a website like TinyPNG.com to optimize your images.

Here are some more tips on improving Divi performance: Don’t use many plugins if you don’t have to. Clean your MySQL database & lower down your posts revisions count – you can do so by adding the code define(‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’, 3); to your wp-config.php file (change the number 3 to your desired value). However, the most important thing is good hosting.

So my first recommendation is to switch your hosting to SiteGround if you’re not using them yet. Their servers are optimized for best WP performance with up to date software – PHP, MySQL, Apache, etc.; offering 1-click install and managing the updates of the application; managing security vulnerabilities; offering trained expert WP support and offering specific solutions for faster WP speed. And they also offer free SSL certificates for your domains.

You can find out what SiteGround does to make their clients’ websites faster on their website here. To name a few of these features, they run the clients’ websites on SSD drives, they have built their own caching system, or they also offer PHP7.

There are other great fast web hosting providers, too, but I’m particularly happy with SiteGround, because it is a great web host with affordable prices. And to speed up your website to the maximum, don’t forget to do the other things that I’ve mentioned above (e.g. images optimization), because that is very important as well.

Finally, one more thing that you can do to improve your website’s loading time is to replace Google Analytics with a more lightweight option. You can read more about this in my other article on this blog.