How to speed up a WordPress site: 12 proven steps

You cannot tell whether a change helped unless you measured first. Use a speed testing tool on your key pages, and test on a mobile connection, because that is where most visitors are and where slow sites hurt most. Write down the results.

Look at three things in particular: how soon the main content appears, how long the page takes to become usable and whether things jump around as the page loads. Google reports these as Core Web Vitals, and they are a useful common language. Change one thing at a time, so you know what worked.

A photographer has a portfolio page with forty images, each uploaded straight from the camera at several megabytes. The page takes many seconds to appear on a phone. She follows a simple order of work, measuring before and after each step.

First she resizes and compresses the images to the size they are actually displayed, and converts them to a modern format, which removes most of the page weight. Second she turns on lazy loading so images below the screen load only when needed. Third she enables page caching, so the server stops rebuilding the page for every visitor. Fourth she deactivates two plugins she barely uses.

The page now appears in a fraction of the time, and the biggest single gain came from the images, not from any clever setting. The lesson is to find the heaviest item first and fix that before touching anything else.

Speed work without measurement is guesswork. Pick two or three important pages, such as the home page and your main product or service page, and test them with a free tool such as PageSpeed Insights before you change anything. Write the results down.

Test more than once, because a single run can vary, and test mobile as well as desktop. Make one change at a time and test again. If a change gives no improvement, undo it, since every setting you add is something else to maintain. Pay attention to the visitor experience measures, such as how quickly the main content appears and whether the page jumps around, rather than chasing a perfect score.

Plugins can only do so much if the server underneath is slow. Our hosting runs on the LiteSpeed web server with servers in London, which suits UK visitors, and includes Redis object caching to take repeated database work off the site. See our pages on LiteSpeed hosting and Redis object cache for how these help WordPress in particular.

Combine a good server with sensible content and you will rarely need anything exotic. If you have done the basics and the site is still slow, contact us through live chat, open 24/7, and we can help you look at where the time is going.

Images usually make up most of a page's weight. A photograph straight from a phone might be 4 MB, but the same picture resized to the width of your layout and compressed can be 150 KB. Multiply by a gallery and the difference decides whether your page loads in two seconds or ten.

Resize before upload when you can. Use a plugin to compress automatically, create WebP versions and serve the right size to each device. Check that large "hero" images at the top of the page are optimised, because they are what visitors wait for. Finally, avoid sliders with many large images, which add a lot of weight for little benefit.