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5 tips to speed up your WordPress website
A slow website costs you customers. Most people won't sit and wait for a page to load - they'll hit the back button and click the next result instead, which is usually one of your competitors. Google notices too. It says its ranking systems reward pages that give people a good experience, and it measures a big part of that with something called Core Web Vitals.
Google looks at three things, based on real visits to your site:
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) - how long the main content takes to appear. Aim for under 2.5 seconds.
Interaction to Next Paint (INP) - how quickly the page reacts when someone taps or clicks. Aim for under 200 milliseconds.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) - how much things jump around while the page loads. Aim for under 0.1.
You can check yours for free with Google's PageSpeed Insights - just pop your web address in. If you've got Search Console set up, the Core Web Vitals report shows how every page on your site is doing.
So, here are my 5 tips for making your WordPress site quicker.
Hosting is the first place to start. Cheap shared hosting packs lots of websites onto the same server, all fighting over the same resources, so your site slows down whenever someone else's gets busy. A good host is something you should never cheap out on.
Look for a host that offers server-level caching and runs a current version of PHP. WordPress recommends PHP 8.3 or newer, and plenty of sites are still running much older versions. Upgrading can make a noticeable difference on its own, and it's better for security too.
Premium themes and drag-and-drop page builders may seem like a cheap and easy way to get your website up and running, but they often come with tons of bloat you'd never need or use - extra scripts, styles and features loaded on every page, whether you use them or not. They definitely serve their purpose, but you don't need to buy the whole cow when all you need is milk.
A lightweight theme, or a site built around what your business actually needs, will almost always be quicker. It's the main reason I build sites from scratch rather than starting from a theme.
Some plugins have tons of features you don't need - or even if you need them, you may not need them on every page. A contact form plugin, for example, often loads its scripts across the whole site, even though the form only appears on one page.
Go through your plugins every so often and ask whether each one is still earning its place. A free plugin like Query Monitor can show you what's slowing things down, so you can make an informed decision on whether to keep it.
Images are usually the heaviest thing on the page, and one of the most common reasons a site is slow. A photo straight off your phone can easily be several megabytes, when it only needs to be a fraction of that.
Resize images to roughly the size they'll actually be shown at
Use modern formats like WebP or AVIF, which are much smaller than JPEGs at the same quality - WordPress supports both
Let images further down the page load only when they're needed (WordPress does this by default now)
Every time someone visits a WordPress page, the server builds it from scratch - running PHP, querying the database and putting it all together. Caching saves a ready-made copy of each page, so the next visitor gets it straight away. A lot of good hosts include this. If yours doesn't, a caching plugin like WP Rocket or WP Super Cache will do the job.
A CDN (content delivery network) like Cloudflare goes a step further, storing copies of your site's files on servers around the world, so they're delivered from somewhere close to whoever's visiting.
The old advice was to move your JavaScript to the bottom of the page. These days, use the defer attribute instead - since WordPress 6.3 you can set it properly when you register a script with wp_register_script(). And if you're using a build tool like Vite, minifying your CSS and JavaScript is taken care of for you.
So there you have it, my 5 tips for a quicker website. If yours is still slow after all that, or you'd rather someone else took a look, get in touch and I'll tell you honestly what's worth fixing. Regular speed checks are also part of my Care+ plan.
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