WordPress Speed: What to Do and in What Order

If your website is slow to load, people leave before reading anything. This guide brings together, in order, what truly makes a website fast. It’s written for the person who makes decisions about the website, not the developer. Each section explains what it is, why it matters, and what needs to be done. The technical instructions are at the end, in a separate block for the person who will carry them out.

Why Your Website’s Speed Matters

Speed isn’t a technical detail. It’s the first impression every visitor gets. And it decides whether they stay or leave.

A slow website is tiring, sells less, and damages your image. It’s especially noticeable on mobile, where people have less patience. And Google ranks it lower in search results. A fast website keeps people there, encourages purchases, and gets Google to rank you higher. That’s why speed is a business decision, not an IT task.

What Can Go Wrong

Improving speed has its pitfalls. These are the ones we see most often:

• Making changes without a backup. If something breaks, there’s no going back. Backup first, change later.
• Installing plugins blindly. Each plugin adds work to every visit. Two that do the same thing just get in each other’s way.
• Activating everything at once. Some improvements break the homepage photo carousel, a form, or a map. If you activate ten things, you won’t know which one broke it.
• Stale content. When the website stores each page already made, it needs to be refreshed when you publish a change. Otherwise, the visitor sees the old version.
• Things that disappear. If the website stops loading what isn’t visible yet, some embedded video or map might not appear. There’s a solution, but you need to know about it.
• Changing without measuring. Without a measurement before and another after, you don’t know if it made any difference.

The Nine Measures, at a Glance

Almost every list of tips repeats the same things. We’ve brought them together into nine measures, which also serve as this guide’s index. Order matters: the first ones deliver more results with less effort. All of this can be done manually, or comes standard with PF Hosting.

1. Good hosting and page caching (each page stored ready-made). This solves most of the problem.
2. Your website copied onto servers distributed around the world. So it loads quickly from anywhere.
3. Lighter images. These are almost always the heaviest element.
4. Lighter code. Remove what’s unnecessary and defer what isn’t needed at the start.
5. Make the text visible even if the font takes time to arrive.
6. Don’t load what the visitor can’t see yet.
7. A lightweight theme, few plugins, and a clean database. Less work on every visit.
8. Have the server send files compressed.
9. Measure before and after. Without measurement there’s no improvement, only opinions.

1. Hosting and Caching: The Foundation of Everything

The first thing is the server where your website lives. A good theme won’t save a saturated or poorly configured server. That’s why it’s the first place to look.

What to Ask of WordPress Hosting

Not all hosting providers treat WordPress the same. Before signing up, or staying where you are, check this list.

• Each page stored ready-made, by the server itself and not just by a plugin. It’s the difference between building the page on every visit or serving it ready-made.
• Updates handled by them, with a prior backup. An outdated WordPress is slow and, above all, insecure.
• A filter that stops attacks before they reach your website.
• Your website copied onto servers distributed around the world, so images don’t always come from your server.
• Ability to grow when traffic increases, without having to migrate again.
• Support that responds when something fails, with people who know WordPress.
• Server software, up to date. WordPress relies on other software to run. Each new version usually runs faster.

If your hosting doesn’t meet several points on this list, the most cost-effective improvement isn’t another plugin. It’s changing hosting. We built PF Hosting with your own server for your website and servers distributed around the world. It also includes a filter that stops attacks, daily backups, and updates handled by us.

Caching: On Your Server and Close to the Visitor

There are two ways to prevent your website from building each page on every visit. They don’t compete: they complement each other.

The page stored on your server is created by a plugin or the server itself. It stores the assembled page and serves it as-is. This way the server works less and handles more visits with the same resources.

Your website can also be stored on many servers distributed around the world. Each visitor receives it from the nearest one. Someone visiting from afar doesn’t have to reach your server.

The usual approach is to use both methods. With one condition: when you publish a change, both must be refreshed. Otherwise, the visitor sees old content.

2. Your Website, Copied onto Servers Around the World

These servers store your images, your code, and your fonts at many points around the world. They serve them from the one closest to each visitor. The website loads faster, your server works less, and it’s also more protected from attacks. We set them up piece by piece, to tailor them to each website. How it’s done is in the final block.

Properly set up, they do two more things. In front, a filter is placed that stops attacks before they reach your server. And your visitor’s browser stores a copy of the images and code for a long time. That way it doesn’t request what it already has. Both are part of PF Hosting.

3. Images: The Weight That Shows Most

Images are almost always the largest part of a page’s weight. The basics are in optimizing images in WordPress. Compressing them, uploading them already at the size they’ll be displayed, and choosing a modern format. And serving them from servers distributed around the world.

Here we add two techniques. The first: a modern image format that weighs significantly less with the same quality. A plugin converts the images and stores the lighter version alongside the original. The second: notifying the browser from the start which is the main image above the fold, so it displays it sooner. What Google looks at most when grading you is how long that main image takes to appear. That’s why the notification pays off.

4. Lighter Code

Each theme and each plugin adds its own code files. Without control, a page requests dozens of files before showing anything. Three things reduce that work:

• Remove what’s unnecessary: whitespace and the notes the programmer left written in the code. The file weighs less and works the same.
• Combine several files into one, to make fewer requests.
• Defer what isn’t needed to display what’s seen first.

There are plugins that do all three. Whichever you choose, go slowly. Activate one option and check the website on several pages and on mobile. Only then activate the next one. Deferring code can break the homepage photo carousel, a form, or a map. If it happens, you’ll want to know which option caused it. The detail, option by option and by hand, without plugins, is in making your WordPress code lighter.

5. Fonts: Make the Text Visible from the First Moment

A custom font takes time to download. While it arrives, the browser may leave the text invisible for up to a second. The solution is simple: display the text with a system font and swap it when the proper one is ready. Google recommends and measures this.

Two more measures that help equally. Use few different fonts, and for each only what you truly need: regular and bold. And store the fonts on your own server, instead of requesting them from Google. That way your visitor’s data doesn’t leave your server. We explain it in optimizing fonts in WordPress.

6. Don’t Load What No One Sees Yet

Images, videos, and maps below the first screen aren’t needed at the start. You can tell the browser to wait: download them only when the visitor scrolls down to them. This is called lazy loading. WordPress already does this by default for images. A plugin extends it to videos and backgrounds. The page weighs less and displays sooner.

A warning, with a real case. After migrating a client’s website, some embedded videos and maps stopped appearing on several pages. They looked fine in the editor. The culprit was lazy loading: that content couldn’t handle being loaded later. The solution wasn’t to disable it, but to exclude that element. Almost all plugins have an exclusion list. If something disappears after enabling it, start there.

7. Lightweight Theme, Few Plugins, and Clean Database

Three measures that cost no money and are often forgotten:

• Use a lightweight theme. A theme with hundreds of options and a visual editor loads a lot of code your website doesn’t use. The less it does, the faster it will run.
• Deactivate and delete the plugins you don’t need. Each one adds work to every visit. If two do the same thing, keep one. We have a post about which speed plugins work well together and which don’t.
• Clean up the database. Old versions of each page, spam comments and expired data cause the database to grow unnecessarily. A plugin can do this with two clicks. It’s also worth limiting how many old versions WordPress keeps. We explain this in optimizing the WordPress database.

8. Have the server send compressed files

Compressing what travels to the browser reduces its size. Ask your provider if they have this compression enabled. It’s free, and any serious hosting provider offers it. If they say no, that’s a bad sign about everything else.

9. Measure: before, after, and without fooling yourself

Without a baseline measurement, you won’t know whether an improvement made any difference. Google has a free speed tool. Enter your website address, click «Analyze,» and it gives you a report for mobile and another for desktop. Each includes a score from 0 to 100 and a list of recommendations, ordered by impact.

The four scores you need to understand

• How long until the first content appears on screen. This is the moment the visitor knows the page is arriving.
• How long until the largest element of the first screen is visible, almost always an image or a headline. This is the score that carries the most weight.
• How much the layout shifts while loading. It’s that button that moves just as you were about to click it.
• How long the page takes to respond to your actions. This is where heavy code takes its toll.

The top score is a simulation. The tool also shows what actually happens to people who visit you, when the site gets enough traffic. That data is more valuable. How to read each recommendation is explained in the speed score Google gives your website.

The correct order: measure, apply, measure again

1. Make a backup. Before touching anything. If something goes wrong, you can revert in minutes.
2. Measure the current state, on both mobile and desktop, and save the report. Also measure two or three interior pages, not just the homepage.
3. Apply one measure at a time, in the order of this guide. First hosting and page caching, then images and distributed servers, then code.
4. Measure again after each change and compare with the saved report. If a measure doesn’t improve anything or breaks something, undo it.
5. Repeat in a few weeks. Plugins update and content grows. What’s fine today may not be tomorrow.

If your site isn’t slow overall, but only at specific times or only when you log in to edit, the problem is usually something else. We cover this in Slow WordPress: possible causes and how to increase speed.

And if you’d rather not do it yourself

Write to us with your website address. We’ll tell you how it would perform on PF Hosting and what would change. And if you have someone who handles the website, pass them the section below.

What we use

PF Hosting runs on AWS, Amazon’s data centers, within the European Union. Each website has its own server, with no public address. Amazon CloudFront sits in front as the CDN, with AWS WAF as an attack filter. Backups are daily and updates are handled by our team.

The plugins mentioned in this guide are another matter: we use them when working on a client’s WordPress. WP Offload Media sends images to a private S3 bucket and serves them through the CDN. EWWW Image Optimizer converts them to WebP. WP-Optimize cleans the database. For minifying, combining and deferring CSS and JavaScript, WP Rocket (paid) or Autoptimize (free). Page caching is done by the server, or by WP Super Cache, W3 Total Cache or WP Rocket. Cloudflare is the alternative CDN with edge HTML caching. Gzip or Brotli compression on the server. We measure with Google PageSpeed Insights.

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