If you’re here, you’re probably tired of how slow your WordPress website hosted with Godaddy is. Perhaps it takes forever to even start loading the page when visiting, or maybe the backend moves like a snail, or perhaps just everything is slow.
I’m here to tell you: you’re not alone!
The quality of your website hosting is the #1 factor that determines how fast your website is, so it’s important to get right.
In this post, I’m going to go over the main reasons Godaddy hosting is so slow for WordPress websites and also go over a few options for speeding it up.
The main reason your website is slow with Godaddy: because Godaddy provides cheap hosting.
Let’s face it, it’s basically free. Hosts like Godaddy, Hostgator, Bluehost, or even – *shudder* – Network Solutions all have the same crippling flaw: they are incredibly cheap. They simply do not cost enough for their providers to give you a good service. They wouldn’t be able to make money that way.
Instead, they compete on pricing, taking advantage of the fact that most people have no idea that the quality of website hosting actually is incredibly important. They scrape pennies of profit per site but make up for it by hosting millions of them. Random website errors are just the tip of the iceberg.
Let’s go over some of the specific ways in which Godaddy (and their competitors) cuts corners that result in very slow hosting.
1. Too many websites on a single server
Ideally, there would be a limit to how many websites are being hosted on a single, physical server. But Godaddy shared hosting (which includes all hosting plans – yes, even VPS – with the only exception being true, Dedicated Server) is far from ideal.
Instead, they cram thousands and thousands of websites onto the same servers, bringing them to a crawl. The server may be powerful, but it’s routing traffic for thousands (or more) of visitors simultaneously. Every time someone visits your website, they’re basically given a ticket and told to wait in line until the server is ready to give them the web page.
Are you starting to understand why it’s so slow?
2. No dedicated server resources (CPU, RAM)
In this shared hosting scheme, no website has dedicated resources from which to pull. This means that if another site on the server is getting massive amount of traffic or it is getting hacked, you suffer for it.
A good hosting setup should include resources that are assigned just to you. That way you always have access to a ready CPU and there will always be RAM available to you. Even if there are other sites on the server, they are limited in resources and cannot take away your access to your own resources.
3. Slow or old hardware
It would be easy to assume that the “hosting service” provided by Godaddy and others is the same no matter when you buy it or other random factors.
But it’s not true. There is a huge variety of servers that they use. Some might be newer, but many are quite old. Anecdotally, I used to have a hosting account at Godaddy and I seem to recall we went at least 8 years without having to change to a different one. And it didn’t seem like a new server even when I started.
In computer years: that’s a very old server.
You may be running on outdated hardware that’s struggling to keep up with the demands of modern WordPress websites, and it may very well be the cause of your website slowness.
And the worst part is: there’s really no way to know what server they will put you on.
4. Lack of optimization and caching
While this may be changing industry-wide, most bargain-barrel hosting plans won’t include effective WordPress optimization and caching. Quality hosting should work well even without it, but a hosting platform designed specifically for WordPress sites should absolutely provide these things.
A base level of optimization should be mandatory to make sure you’re getting the most out of your hardware, and quality caching is complementary and should yield even better performance gains.
Most base-level hosting plans at Godaddy and similar hosts will not be providing these things effectively, if at all.
It’s not entirely bad news, though. There are some things you can do to improve your performance, even at Godaddy.
Note that these may provide marginal improvements. They can’t solve the fact that the underlying hosting is the primary bottleneck.
But even so, progress is progress, and these will provide some level of improvement.
What can you do to improve your website loading times?
1. Delete unnecessary plugins and keep the site simple
Godaddy hosting is generally going to be wildly underpowered for a robust WordPress site, so your best bet is to minimize that load. You’ll want to simplify your site and cut back on the resources needed from the hosting server.
Make sure you only use a handful of plugins and stick to basic themes.
I personally wouldn’t even consider trying to use WooCommerce or host an ecommerce site with them. It’s just going to be too slow.
2. Add caching
There are a variety of quality caching plugins out there that may result in improved site performance. They do this by reducing the load on the server and essentially pre-rendering pages.
Ideally you’d use a premium caching plugin like WP Rocket (which we include at no cost with our hosting plans), but at that point you may be better off just spending that money on better hosting to begin with.
3. Ask to be moved to a different server if yours is particularly bad
If you have a suspicion that you’re just on a dud server (which can absolutely happen as mentioned earlier), you may be able to call up Godaddy support and ask them to move you to a different server. Say you’ve been having consistent problems with this one and you believe a different server will perform better for you.
They may or may not comply with your request, but it’s worth a shot. More than likely they’ll try to sell you on a higher-quality hosting plan, which may or may not have better performance.
Just as a side-note: their more-expensive plans may not be any better. VPS hosting is on the same kinds of servers and may literally not provide any performance benefit of any kind. It has all the same pitfalls since it’s still just shared hosting.
4. Use third-party add-0n services like Cloudflare CDN or Jetpack
It’s possible to use third-party services to shoulder some of the server load and make it easier for Godaddy’s servers to handle your website. Using a CDN is one way to do that.
It can be a huge hassle to set up, though, and you’ll have to test whether it is actually improving load times.
Additionally, you may be better off just paying for quality hosting to begin with, rather than trying to polish the turd that is Godaddy hosting.
Long-term solution: switch to a better host.
Ultimately, there’s only one solution that is virtually guaranteed to greatly improve performance, and that is to switch to a higher-quality host.
The funny thing is that it isn’t even expensive. In fact, you may even save money going to better hosting. If you are running a business and you hope to actually make money, paying for quality hosting is one of the best ROI services you can pay for. With a faster website, you will greatly improve conversions and generate more revenue from your website without having to do anything else.
Our premium WordPress hosting service is just $25/month and it’s fully-managed meaning that we handle all hosting-related maintenance and troubleshooting for you and you never have to sit on the phone with support.
There are plenty of other quality hosts out there that would provide a better service than Godaddy at various price-points.
There’s really no excuse to stay with them. The only people who I would recommend sticking with a bargain host are individuals or organizations who aren’t intending to make money from their site and have no budget at all, or possibly brand-new businesses that are just getting started and need to be aggressive with their costs for now.
Any established business or organization really should not skimp on hosting. It’s truly a no-brainer.
