UPDATE TO THIS POST (April 2024): We released this guide over 9 years ago. Since then, we’ve updated it regularly with the latest information on Wordpress speed optimization.
When we first released this guide we got dozens of emails each month asking for help with WordPress speed problems and fixing slow Wordpress websites so we ended up creating a new Wordpress Speed Optimization Service - WP Speed Fix. Since launched we’ve worked on well over 4000 websites.
If you’re looking for a shortcut run your site through the speed test tool at SiteSpeedBot.com - it's free and in under 60 seconds will give you detailed recommendations in plain english and some of the specific reasons why your site is running slowly and give you some starting points on where to fix it.
In this guide, I’m going to give you a checklist of the most important steps you can take to speed up your site in the order you should tackle them. It's a cut down version of how we fix slow Wordpress websites.
Then we’ll get deep into the details further down the page. Whether you’re a tech newbie or you’ve done this a few times before, you’ll find an answer to your question of, "How do I fix my slow WordPress website?"
There is a lot of troubleshooting you can do to speed up your WordPress site and you can burn days of time tweaking and messing with it, but the majority of WordPress issues usually come down to poor quality web hosting or hosting-related problems so that’s probably the first place you should start.
Contents
Before we get into specifics lets take a quick look at why your Wordpress site is slow. By understanding what’s causing the slow loading or poor response time it’ll help narrow down the steps you can take to fix it.
We’ve broken the fixes down in more detail below. Use the table of contents to skip to each section.
If you’re looking for help to fix your slow site or optimize it’s speed, take a look at our Wordpress speed optimization service, WPSpeedFix.com
Get rid of the $3/month garbage hosting. A high quality webhost with HTTP2 protocol support will make a world of difference. Weirdly, in 2024 there's no real price difference between the fastest hosts and horrible hosts like Bluehost, Godaddy and Hostgator. The difference is something like the price of a coffee versus the price of lunch.
Fast Wordpress Hosts we recommend are:
Siteground - the absolute minimum entry point, it’s cheap, passable from a speed perspective and a much better option that Bluehost, Hostgator, Godaddy and other cheap hosts
Cloudways - these guys offer dedicated VPS servers on a speed optimized server stack which means lightning fast speeds AND they're dirt cheap starting at $10/USD AND they offer 60+ locations worldwide (see our Fastest Wordpress Hosting article for more detail). Cloudways are probably our favorite hosting provider right now, fast, stable and dirt cheap!
**If you sign up to Cloudways, use the coupon code FASTHOSTING for $25 credit so ~2.5 months free on a base serve
WPX Hosting - a dedicated WordPress host, fantastic balance of speed vs price with data centers in the US and UK
Kinsta - more expensive BUT better if you’re not a DIY-er and have a site that’s making plenty of $$$ (also has a bunch of other awesome features that make this a high end managed host)
Hosts we know for 100% are slow and that will cause you problems are:
….these guys all make money by stacking 10,000 other sites on the same server which leads to slow, unreliable hosting. You'll see these recommended all over the place on the web but the reality is they pay very high commissions to bloggers who recommend them!
***KEY POINT HERE - make sure you host your site in the country where the bulk of your visitors or customers are. Typically the site will be 1+ second slower outside the country it is hosted in. We’re based in Australia and it’s extremely common for businesses we work with to be hosted in the US which ultimately causes the site to load slowly in Australia.
Why Hosting Is So Important:
Hosting is the foundational component of everything you do online. Your SEO and Google rankings, your Adwords and Facebook ads, and the enquiries, calls and emails your site generates are all tied to the quality of your hosting.
Faster, more reliable hosting will easily pay for itself in the form of more enquiries, calls and sales coming through your website.
If your website is your main source of revenue, then it makes sense to pay for the best hosting you can get, because it’s going to have a direct impact on how much money your business makes.
It’s not just speed that’s important, the quality of your host is critical! Cheap hosts are horrible in terms of uptime and if you run uptime monitoring on your site (try http://uptimerobot.com, free plan available) you’ll likely see multiple outages each day on cheap hosts.
This is the perfect example of spending money to make money, and if you want to make a lot of money, you’re not going to do it when you’re spending $5 a month on your hosting.
A Note on VPS Hosting:
Some common advice you’ll see around the web is that if you want a high performance site you should run your site on a VPS, but this isn’t necessarily a good idea.
Yes, a VPS has more raw server power than a regular hosting account, but server power accounts for only 25% of total performance. Server configuration is significantly more important, and unless you’re a server specialist, you’re not going to have the skills or knowledge to optimize your server to a higher standard than that of a managed WordPress hosting provider.
This is one of the reasons why we LOVE Cloudways - you get the power of a dedicated server AND the configuration is built and optimized for speed.
Quite often the cheap hosts in the list above (eg Hostgator and Bluehost) will upsell you/upgrade you to a dedicated VPS host but the problem here is that you're still on a poor quality, oversubscribed host. It's like buying the premium option in the 2 dollar store, it might be their premium product but you're still in the 2 dollar store!
A key component of getting Wordpress to run fast is to use caching. Caching prebuilds each page on your site so all the thinking and processing required to serve the page to the visitor is done before they request the page from your web server.
WP Rocket is the caching plugin of choice for the DIY-er or if you're less tech savvy. It's easy to use and will give you an excellent boost in performance. It’s a paid plugin (dirt cheap) BUT probably the easiest caching plugin to use on the market.
We have a detailed WP Rocket Configuration Guide here that will help you squeeze the most juice from it.
W3 Total Cache is free so is a great alternative to WP Rocket BUT it is very technical to configure so probably not ideal for the DIYer - unless you know what you're doing there's a reasonable chance you'll break your site. If you do use it only enable the Browser and Page Caching options.
If you're a developer reading this, one huge win is to get Memcached or Redis installed/enabled on your server and enable Object caching in W3TC and you'll see a huge performance boost on database heavy operations, especially in the backend (also a must-do for Woocommerce speed optimization)
Some hosts like WPEngine, Siteground and Cloudways have caching built-in or their own caching plugin which is part of the reason why they run so fast. We'd typically still use WP Rocket on these hosts as there's additional optimizations it does on top of caching that make it worth it.
NEVER install two caching plugins as that's just asking for trouble (a very common issue we see) AND make sure before messing with caching you have a backup (we only use Blogvault, it's by far the best) and you have Cpanel and/or FTP access to the site as maybe in 1 in 100 sites the caching plugin will be incompatible with something and take down the site (again use WP Rocket if you're not tech savvy). CPanel/FTP access will allow you to revert the changes in case you do break something.
Cloudflare.com is a service that sits in front of your website hosting and from a speed perspective is like magic!
They’re the fastest DNS hosting provider in the world (see http://dnsperf.com), they’re a content delivery network (CDN) and website acceleration service AND for 7 out of 10 websites we work on, the free plan is all you need. Because it’s a CDN it will significantly speed up your website for your international visitors.
A lot of hosting has Cloudflare functionality built-in into it with an option in the Cpanel - if you have that then turn it on.
In some cases, typically in bigger companies where IT policy dictates which providers you use, you may not be able to use Cloudflare. If you're serving big files like PDFs, MP3s, videos and podcasts they you may need a full CDN.
What is a content delivery network?
A CDN (content delivery network) is a network of servers around the world that host part of your website and associated files. A CDN is especially important for sites that serve an international audience, as the CDN servers will often be closer to the visitor than the web-hosting and therefore faster, and sites that have big traffic spikes as the CDN servers will absorb most of that traffic.
The CDN service we recommend is KeyCDN they provide excellent performance at a great price.
Compress the images on your site using lossless compression (which creates smaller files sizes with no reduction in image quality). We've tried pretty much all the image compression plugins on the market and right now we're loving ShortPixel (they have a FREE plan so you can give them a try with zero cost)
Often images used on your site can be compressed by 20 to 50% with no impact on the quality. This can easily cut 1 to 2 seconds off the load time of a page and make a huge difference to performance. This might not sound like a lot, but it can be the difference between someone taking the action you want them to, and losing their patience and clicking away from the site.
Make sure you use LOSSLESS compression and NOT lossy compression, here’s the difference:
Lossless = smaller file size, same quality image (great!) Lossy = slight smaller file size, less image quality (bad for business)
We never want to sacrifice the quality of our images for a marginal speed gain. Our approach to website speed is always a marketing first/commercial first approach and lossy images hurt out marketing.
Often images can be compressed by 20 to 50%, which can easily cut 1 to 2 seconds off the load time of a page.
ShortPixel has some more advanced image optimization versus other plugins so you'll generally get a better result. Click here or the image below for their quick optimization test which will tell you approximately how much smaller your page size will be after image optimization.
This article explains how to implement NexGen .webp file image optimization and lazy loading for even faster speeds.
When your site is running in HTTPS mode (encrypted) your web browser software will use the newer HTTP2 protocol (so long as your host supports it) which is significantly faster than the older HTTP 1.1 protocol.
Click play on the video below and you’ll see the speed difference between the two. Important note, your host needs to support HTTP2 and most cheap hosts don’t, SiteSpeedBot.com will check your site for HTTP2 support.
Contrary to a lot of things you’ll read around the web, HTTPS will not slow your site down if your host if HTTP2 compatible. Cloudflare also has a feature called 0RTT (zero round trip time) which speeds up the HTTPS encryption negotiation even further!
PHP is the underlying programming framework or language that Wordpress runs on. PHP 8 is the latest version and each version typically performs better than the last. Switching from v5.6 to version 7.x equates to roughly a 30% overall load speed increase on your site and moving up each version can give you a 5-10% speed boost again.
You can see the latest version of PHP over on the PHP website at https://php.watch/versions
For most hosts you can make the switch in your hosting admin management panel. If you’re unsure, log a ticket with your hosting provider and they should be able to help.
IMPORTANT - don't just make this switch randomly especially if you have an older website. As PHP is upgraded older functions are deprecated, i.e. newer versions may not support code written for older versions. So the PHP version you're looking to move to first. WPEngine provide a free PHP compatibility tester plugin you can use on any website, click here to download their PHP Compatibility Check Plugin.
This is especially important for older sites - take an inventory of the plugins you’re using and disable or delete any that you’re no longer using. Less plugins is better from a speed perspective.
Be mindful of plugins that load elements from third party sites for example Sumo.com and Leadpages. Plugins that insert analytics codes, livechat code or remarketing code can also be very heavy from a speed perspective. Using Google Tag Manager (google.com/tagmanager) is generally a better way to insert tracking codes if speed is your priority.
Below we are going to dig into each of these solutions in detail. It’s amazing how often the same problems crop up for WordPress sites, so try out the common troubleshooting steps listed.
You might get lucky with an easy fix, and you’ll save yourself a lot of time, energy and money tackling these before you go looking for something much more complex.
Before making any changes, make sure you do a baseline speed test using SiteSpeedBot.com so that you have a baseline to work from.
If you're still stuck after all of these options (or don’t want the headache of handling it all yourself), check out WP Speed Fix service.
We’ll do a full back-up of your site, diagnose the root cause of your problem, explain it all to you in plain English, and then get it fixed immediately. The whole process is handled in 3 to 5 business days, so that you’re straight up and running faster than ever before.
Check out the WP Speed Fix here to get your speed issues sorted out in the next week.
Alright. Let’s get into the weeds for each of these solutions so you can start troubleshooting the problems with your slow WordPress website.
Most WordPress websites are hosted on a cheap hosting provider that stacks ten thousand other websites on top of each other on the same server. This means that all the websites are competing for CPU power and server resources.
Unsurprisingly, this makes your site slow, especially when you start having more than a few people visit your site at once. Overloading servers is the only way hosting companies can make any money on those cheap $5/month plans.
The Number 1 Priority to fix your WordPress speed issues is to set up Cloudflare (a caching and acceleration service) and move your site to high quality hosting - we break down the best WordPress hosts here.
Let me be straight with you here: If you’re being cheap and spending the price of a cup of coffee, per month on hosting, your site is absolutely going to run slowly.
It will annoy your customers and cost you money. For most WordPress sites, moving to managed WP host will bring your site load time down to 1-3 seconds, immediately, and save you all the stress and hassle of having an underperforming website!
Why Good Hosting is Important…
Hosting is the foundational component of everything you do with your website. Better hosting means a faster, more reliable website. That means that your SEO, Adwords and traffic generation efforts will drive more new visitors with higher engagement (faster site = better SEO rankings; faster site = customers more likely to stick around).
Because the user experience is better, better hosting will also normally improve your conversion rate slightly too (better customer experience = more likely to buy from you).
So yes, good hosting does cost more than the ‘bargain bin’ hosting most sites run on. But if you’re running a business off that WordPress site, then better hosting WILL more than pay for the additional cost.
If you have a tight budget, then the best option is to go with is Siteground - for most sites it falls into the "fast enough" bucket.
Once you’ve got your hosting sorted out, it’s time to add Cloudflare into the mix.
Even if you’re using hosting that’s total rubbish, Cloudflare can often cut load times in half. Here’s how it helps with your WordPress speed:
Note that this is a different type of CDN to what WPEngine and some hosting providers offer. Don't use two CDNs as combining them can often be slower than no CDN at all.
It introduces lossless image compression, a content delivery network for faster worldwide delivery, Javascript, HTML and CSS compression/combining ,and other intelligent browser systems to make the site feel like it’s loading faster.
As I mentioned, Cloudflare also takes over your DNS hosting. There are two distinct issues with slow sites — either the site itself is overloaded and slow, or the DNS hosting and DNS lookups (at the hosting servers) are slow.
Usually it’s the DNS that’s the issue, and as long as you’re on poor quality hosting, it’s out of your control. This is why I’m so adamant about using Cloudflare — even if you stay on your cheap hosting, it can drastically increase the performance of your site.
(Of course, I also think you should get better hosting so that you don’t get stuck in a bad situation when their servers inevitably crash.)
Cloudflare is also free, so there’s really no reason not to use it.
If you’ve never heard of Cloudflare before this article, here’s a quick video explanation:
Usually we recommend troubleshooting in two parts:
Before we get to work on a client site, we run the site through SiteSpeedBot.com to get an independent speed test. This gives us a feel for load times and lets us see which files are being loaded and what their sizes are.
This sets our baseline speed so we can see whether the changes we’re implementing are having a positive or negative impact. Often this speed test will uncover the root cause of the problem and we can then easily resolve it.
We also run the site through the w3c validator to make sure there are no major coding errors – occasionally we’ll find some big problems here which are easy fixes if you know what you’re looking for.
Once you’ve fixed your hosting and added Cloudflare, you can work through this troubleshooting checklist.
Check for plugin errors using the Query Monitor: this plugin will help identify errors and issues that are happening under the bonnet that are impacting speed.
You’ve probably ended up on this page because you were looking for solutions on Google to fix your slow WordPress website.
Rather than waste time fiddling with your site yourself and potentially breaking things, let us do it for you.
With our WP Speed Fix Service we’ll fix your WordPress speed issues or we’ll give you your money back.
We’ll do it quickly, too. It usually only takes us 3 to 5 business days to fix everything and have your site running like new.
Here’s what we’ll do for you:
Remember that your hosting is the foundational component of everything you do online. Your SEO and Google rankings, your Adwords and Facebook ads and all the leads that comes through your website are tied to the speed and user experience of your website. Faster, more reliable hosting will easily pay for itself in the form of more enquiries, calls and sales.
Want to make sure your site loads as fast as possible?
Click here to get our WP Speed Fix Service
Here are some of the most common questions we get asked about WordPress site speed and speed optimization:
How do I test my WordPress site speed?
There’s lots of different tools on the market and they all work slightly differently. We recommend trying https://SiteSpeedBot.com as it’ll give you detailed recommendations in under 60 seconds that are easy to understand and implement.
My admin panel is slow, how do I fix that?
It’s possible for the front of the site to be loading fast but the backend to load slowly. The WordPress backend uses less caching (and often none at all) so is more reliant on the quality of your hosting and server configuration. This post explains how to troubleshoot a slow WordPress admin panel or backend in more detail.
Why is my site slower with Woocommerce?
Woocommerce, particularly a big Woo site needs much more in terms of hosting quality and CPU power. It’s not just a website it’s a line of business application as well operating both frontend and backend. There are some speed optimization steps specific to Woocommerce, check out this article for more on Woocommerce speed optimization.
Do I need to move hosting?
Not necessarily BUT some features such as HTTP2 protocol support and free HTTPS certificates are standard today across good hosts and are really important for a fast loading website. If your host doesn’t support these two elements you should probably look at moving.
Will switching to a faster theme speed up my site?
Probably not if your site is crawling along. Theme speed does impact the overall render speed of your site but it's usually not the real bottleneck making your site slow. Changing a theme is a huge job so you really want to diagnose the root cause of your slow speed before investing a chunk of time into theme changes. If you want to know more about theme speed, we break down the fastest Wordpress themes here and fastest Woocommerce themes on this page.
How does site speed impact SEO?
There's three ways that site speed impacts SEO:
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FAISAL
Hello…. after i use google adsense and analytics code in wordpress My site is slow, and they told me to fix it as below Do you have a solution to this problem Setting an expiry date or a maximum age in the HTTP header http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js (60 minutes) https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/osd.js (60 minutes) https://www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js (2 hours) my site: gooeos.com
Brendan Tully
Hey buddy, it looks like you’re using Pagespeed insights? don’t use Google Pagespeed Insights for speed testing, it’s rubbish
Use sitespeedbot.com instead, it measures raw load speed, that’s all that matters, you can’t change settings on third party hosted files like this and the recommendations will make no difference to your load speed anyway
Michael Mallmann
Hi! Nice article! I have a question, if you don’t mind! I’ve tested my website (www.comalma.com.br) which is under construction using this tools.pingdom.com (fantastic BTW) and when ranking the results in LOAD ORDER my first two alone took almost 45 seconds. I don’t even know to get it fixed. Any advices?
Darius zak
use Cloudflare – if you have it in your server under cPanel – add the website and it will speed it up.
robzelo
This is a async fix to social button load issue in wordpress https://technovechno.com/fix-add-button-plugin-load-time-issue-wordpress/
Zack Schulze
Mr. Tight-arse here… I manage three different free Wordpress sites (so no plugins or anything), and I only have speed issues in one of them, but thanks for the other tips! The test with https://tools.pingdom.com says that my page loads in 2 seconds, yet in reality it takes like a whole minute or something. First I thought or assumed it was my PC, but I don’t have that issue with any other website, including my other Wordpress sites. I will keep trying though.
Post the link and I’ll take a look for you…what’s the size pingdom reports in MB? If its huge, eg 15-20mb then that will be why it’s slow
Elia
What a great post & updates!
Can I ask if there’s a reliable alternative to “P3 Profiler plugin” ? As it seems to cause a lot of troubles with the latest Wordpress updates.
Thanks a lot 🙂
Ah we should probably update that, use Query Monitor instead. It’ll tell you which plugins are creating really big database lookups
https://en-au.wordpress.org/plugins/query-monitor/
Thanks a lot Brendan, will check it for sure 🙂
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