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 an entirely new brand that focusses on this problem: WP Speed Fix. Since launched we’ve worked on well over 5000 websites.
If you’re looking for a shortcut run your site through our WordPress Site Speed Tool - it's 100% FREE, no opt-in required and in 60-90 seconds will give you detailed recommendations in plain english about where to start.
If you're looking to pass Google's Core Web Vitals Benchmarks, try our Core Web Vitals report. It's free too, no opt-in required.
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. If you're looking for technical help, submit a free site audit request at WPSpeedFix.com & one of our team will review your site in detail and advise how we can help.
Overview:
We released this guide over 10 years ago. Since then, we’ve updated it regularly with the latest information on Wordpress speed optimization.
When optimizing a site, most people make random changes essentially stabbing in the dark and usually end up breaking their site, making their speed go backwards or worse, ruin their SEO.
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.
BEFORE doing anything, I strongly suggest you run a website speed test and review your Core Web Vitals metrics.
Using these tools will help you diagnose where you have a problem so you can address it correctly. Just like going to the doctor, you diagnose the problem FIRST before applying the treatment or taking medicine.
Both the tools linked above are 100% FREE, there's no opt-in required and they'll give you a starting point.
Google's Pagespeed Insights tool will also give you solid recommendations albeit much more technical.
Our WordPress Speed Test will give you detailed recommendations on why your site is slow and how to fix it
Any content on site speed would be incomplete without a mention of Google's Core Web Vitals Benchmarks.
Released in 2020, Core Web Vitals (CWV) is a set of standardized site speed metrics and clear parameters around what is fast or "good" when it comes to speed.
Forget about getting a 100 score in Pagespeed Insights or an A grade in GTMetrix, passing the Core Web Vitals Benchmarks is what your goal should be.
We've explained the metrics in summary below. It's important to understand that page speed or website speed is a dynamic quality. That means every single page load on your website is going to be different.
With CWV, Google is tracking the speed of every single page load of your site in a Google Chrome based browser and is collecting that data in a dataset called the Google Chrome User Experience (CRUX). It then uses an average of the data to determine whether your site is fast or "good"
Core Web Vitals is the REAL ACTUAL speed that users are experiencing on your website. It's possible to have a 100 score or A grade in a speed test tool and still be failing the CWV metrics.
Click here to generate a Core Web Vitals report for your site - you'll need to have 50-100 visits a day in order for Google to have enough data to generate this report. This report generates a monthly data set and updates on the second Tuesday of each new month.
Get rid of the $3/month bargain basement hosting.
A high quality webhost with HTTP2 and HTTP3 protocol support will make a world of difference.
In 2025 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).
**If you sign up to Cloudways, use the coupon code FASTHOSTING for $25 credit so ~2.5 months free on a base serve
WP Alpha - small business focussed with fully managed and self managed WordPress hosting options
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 SimpleUptime) 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.
FlyingPress is another plugin we use and recommend. It's a little more technical and less DIY friendly than WPRocket but if you're a developer that shouldn't be an issue.
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.
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.
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. For well monetized sites, at a minimum we recommend using their $5/mo APO service as it will significantly speed up your site.. 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 are in a larger organization this is a conversation to loop your IT team into.
Cloudflare is also a firewall and there are a number of firewall rules that will also help speed up your site by doing things like blocking brute force attacks. Check out this article on Cloudflare Firewall Rules for WordPress for more detail.
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 the two we like are ShortPixel and EWWW Optimizer.
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.
There's 3 protocols a web browser can use when communicating with your website and hosting.
HTTP 1.1, HTTP 2 and HTTP 3
There is a HUGE performance difference between v1.1 and v2 of this protocol. Typically your site will run 50-100% faster with the HTTP2 protocol in place. The jump from v2 to v3 is not as big but still accounts for maybe another 10% performance gain.
Click play on the video above and you'll see an example of the speed difference between these two protocols.
The HTTP2 protocol was released in 2015 and there are still hosts today that don't support it. Having support for this protocol is critical for site speed.
A simple way to test for this is using our site speed tester. It will flag any issues with HTTP2 protocol support.
Use this tool to check for HTTP3 protocol support.
If your hosting doesn't support the HTTP2 protocol, the first step would be to log a ticket with your hosting provider and get them to fix it. If they can't fix it then we'd recommend moving to a host that does support it.
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.
The steps above cover the fundamentals and for most slow sites will take you from slow to somewhat fast and snappy.
In some cases, these won't work and you need more advanced site speed optimization steps. We've included some additional resources below to help you address those specific issues.
Woocommerce can often be slow for a number of different reasons. Here's some Woocommerce specific resources that may help.
For a Woocommerce site, we'd a minimum recommend using HPOS (high performance order storage) as well as Cloudflare APO. In some cases these can give you significant speed gains, potentially 30-100% improvements in speed.
How To Fix Slow Woocommerce Guide - a guide similar to this one focussed more specifically on Woocommerce.
How to Fix Slow Woocommerce Add-To-Cart - a guide specifically focussed improving the speed when a user clicks on the Add To Cart button
How To Fix Slow Woocommerce Backend - when the Woocommerce admin panel is slow it creates problem because it's likely you're spending a lot of time in there managing orders, products and your site. This guide covers issues specific to Woo backend and admin panel behaving slowly.
How To Fix Slow Woocommerce Checkout - checkout pages can be slow for a variety of reasons including slow shipping provider APIs and merchant providers being slow. This guide will cover those issues.
WooCommerce robots.txt file for better site speed and SEO - this is a Youtube video that walks you through a robots.txt file we deploy to help improve how SEO crawlers access your Woo site
The WordPress backend can be slow for a variety of reasons. Often this is database related and making sure your database uses InnoDB tables instead of MyISAM tables is important.
Here's two resources that will help improve the speed of your backend admin panel:
How To Fix a Slow WordPress Admin Panel - a guide specifically to address the admin panel running slowly
WordPress Database Optimization Guide - this one is particularly useful if you have a bigger site or older site where the database may be running slowly.
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:
Don't use two CDNs as combining them can often be slower than no CDN at all.
Cloudflare is also free, so there’s really no reason not to use it. That said, for high traffic sites we strongly recommend one of the paid plans. Either the $5/month APO service or the $25/month service.
The paid Cloudflare plans introduce something called Edge Caching (Cloudflare call this APO) where your entire site is cached on Cloudflare's network around the world. This moves a substantial amount of the workload off your hosting onto Cloudflare's infrastructure instead.
This service was previously only available on their $200/month plan but you can now get it for $5/month which is ridiculously cheap!
The higher plans also introduce a number of additional features like image optimization and compression as well as a full firewall.
This article will walk you through some of the additional Cloudflare Firewall Rules we use to boost site speed and security. We also offer Cloudflare migration services if you're looking to have someone set this up for you.
If you’ve never heard of Cloudflare before this article, here’s a quick video explanation:
There's three ways that site speed impacts SEO:
If you're looking to hire someone to fix your slow Wordpress site we can help.
At WPSpeedFix we've optimized over 5000 sites and can help optimize yours too.
We can help you with:
To get started, head over to WPSpeedFix and submit a free audit request on our homepage and one of the team will review your site and tell you how we can help.