Make your WordPress website faster: steps in order

Measure first, so you know what is slow. Then look at your hosting and caching, then your images, then plugins, theme and external scripts. That is the order from biggest to smallest effect. If it still is not enough after that, the brake is often the theme or the page builder itself.

How do you measure whether your WordPress website is really slow?

Start with measuring, otherwise you fix the wrong thing. There are two kinds of measurement. Lab tests run a check on a simulated device. Field data comes from real visitors. Google looks at field data, so that is the one that counts.

Use PageSpeed Insights and the Core Web Vitals report in Google Search Console. These are the three metrics Google calls "good", according to web.dev (2026), measured at the 75th percentile of your visitors:

| Metric | What it measures | Good when | |---|---|---| | LCP | How fast the largest piece of content is visible | 2.5 seconds or less | | INP | How fast the page responds to a click or tap | 200 milliseconds or less | | CLS | How much the layout jumps while loading | 0.1 or less |

Measure on mobile, not only on your computer. Many visitors come on a phone, and that is where a site is usually slowest. Want to do this for a webshop? Use my webshop speed test.

Write down your numbers before you change anything. Only with a starting measurement can you see whether a change really helped. Also change one thing at a time. If you change ten things at once and the site gets faster, you do not know which change did it. If it gets slower, you do not know which one broke it.

What is the first step to make a website faster: hosting and caching?

This usually has the biggest effect. If your server answers slowly, the visitor is already waiting before anything is shown. That sits in the first part of LCP: the time until the browser receives the first byte of your page.

What you can do:

• Turn on page caching. Without a cache, WordPress rebuilds every page from the database on every visit. With a cache, the visitor gets a ready-made file. That difference is often big.
• Look at your hosting. Cheap shared hosting spreads one server over many sites. When a neighbour is busy, you are slow. A better tuned server makes a noticeable difference.
• Use a recent PHP version. WordPress itself recommends PHP 8.3 or higher (wordpress.org, 2026). Old versions are slower and no longer safe.

Check this before anything else. A perfectly optimised page on a slow server stays slow.

How do you make images faster without making them ugly?

Images are usually the biggest files on your page, and often the LCP element: the part Google measures. Tackle them in this order:

1. Shrink them to the size you actually show. A photo 4,000 pixels wide in a box 800 pixels wide is waste.
2. Use modern formats such as WebP or AVIF. They are smaller than JPEG at the same quality.
3. Do not delay loading of the main image at the top. Since WordPress 5.5, images get loading="lazy" by default, which loads the image only when it comes into view. More recent WordPress versions often skip the first image already, but check that in your page source. For the image at the top you do not want lazy loading, because web.dev advises: never lazy-load your LCP image. Give that image fetchpriority="high" instead, so the browser fetches it first.
4. Give every image a width and height. Then the browser knows how much room to reserve and the page does not jump (that improves CLS).

Which plugins, theme and scripts slow down your site?

Every plugin adds code. Not every plugin is heavy, but a pile of thirty is. Go through them one by one:

• Remove what you do not use. Deactivated is not gone; the files stay. Really deleting is also safer.
• Replace heavy plugins with lighter ones, or with a few lines of code if the function is small.
• Watch external scripts: chat widgets, trackers, review boxes, maps. Each loads from another server and can drag your INP down. Keep only what earns money.
• Host fonts yourself instead of loading them from an external service, and use no more fonts than needed.

Test after every change. Sometimes removing one plugin gains more than a lot of fine-tuning.

When do you hit the limits of WordPress?

Sometimes optimising is not enough. You can tell by these signs:

• Your page builder (the editor where you drag and drop pages) adds so much extra code that even an empty page is slow.
• You have dozens of plugins that each carry a piece of function, and removing one breaks something.
• Your theme is built to do everything, so it loads everything.
• You do all the steps above and still hang below the threshold.

Then the problem is in the way it is built, not in the settings. A site built to measure loads only what that page needs. I work daily on a Magento 2 webshop with over 3,400 products and 328 active modules. The mobile load time (LCP) there measured 14 to 16 seconds in the lab. For real visitors, Google now measures 2.14 seconds. That was not one trick, but measuring, removing the biggest delay step by step and measuring again. I use the same approach for speed optimisation of other sites.

Want to leave WordPress? My WordPress migration takes your content to a fast, custom-built site. But let me be honest: many WordPress sites are fast enough with a few good changes. Migrating only makes sense when you hit the limit.

Frequently asked questions

What is a good load time for a website?

Google calls an LCP of 2.5 seconds or less good, measured on real visitors at the 75th percentile (web.dev, 2026). Also aim for an INP under 200 milliseconds and a CLS under 0.1. The further below those you are, the better.

Is a caching plugin enough?

Often it helps a lot, but not always enough. A cache fixes a slow server response, not a page that is too heavy. If your images are large or your theme loads a lot of unneeded code, the page is still heavy after caching.

Does a fast website improve my Google ranking?

Speed is one of the things that count, but good content still matters more. A fast page with weak content does not rank by itself. A slow page with strong content does lose visitors before they read.

Can you speed up my WordPress site for me?

Yes. I measure first, show you what the biggest brake is and tackle that. What it costs depends on your site and your hosting, so I set that after a first conversation. Get in touch with your address and I will take a look.