WordPress Speed Optimization Made Easy!

We've optimized over 4000 sites and can help make yours load lightning fast too!

Our WordPress Speed Optimization Services can help you solve slow site problems, fix Core Web Vitals issues, score higher in Google PageSpeed Insights, troubleshoot slow backend issues, optimize Woocommerce checkout speed & much more.

Complete the form to get a FREE site speed audit where one of our team will review your site and advise how we can help meet your goals and solve your speed issues >>

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How To Get Started

Who We Can Help

If you’re on our site then you’re likely looking for help with site speed optimization, slow site issues, technical SEO or ranking higher in Google.

Most businesses we work with have already attempted to speed up their site and are not happy with the result.

They’ve either worked with one or more freelancers without success, or they’re an agency that has in house developers, but still haven’t solved their speed issues or are not getting a “pass” or “good” core in Google’s Core Web Vitals test.

Often they have speed issues that are slippery and difficult to nail down such as a slow WordPress admin backend, slow add to cart and checkout on Woocommerce, slow site for logged in users or persistent 502 and 504 errors when the site is under load.

Some sites have SEO issues and are struggling to rank and clearly site speed and getting a good Core Web Vitals score is part of the problem.

Site Speed Optimization Is More Than Just Installing A Plugin

We’ve worked with nearly 5000 businesses since we started WPSpeedFix in 2015 as an offshoot of our SEO agency. Back then our service was quite simple and making a website fast was a relatively simple process of installing a few plugins, using a good host and compressing images.

Most people are still using that approach today. They test one page, one time using a tool they don’t really understand and install a bunch of plugins that helps a little, but ultimately doesn’t solve their problems.

You Know It Yourself – If a site is slow, you’re much more likely to click away

Today’s consumers are much more sophisticated and more than happy to buy, book, order and communicate online.

They’re much easier to sell to, but the downside is with their shift online, most people’s patience for a poor user experience and slow website is near zero. You know it yourself, if a site is buggy or slow you’ll quickly lose patience and click away.

The Good News…

The good news is that Google’s Core Web Vitals metrics give us detailed and precise numbers to work with and tell us exactly how a site is performing. BUT, that means site speed optimisation is much more complex because all pages count, not just the homepage and all user sessions count, not just a single result in a speed test.

How To Get Started

Typically we start our speed optimization process by looking the overall Core Web Vitals Metrics for a site in our CRUX Dashboard Core Web Vitals reports.

Core Web Vitals Report Example
Above Is A Screenshot Example Of The Report – Click The Image To Generate Your Own

You can create your own report for free in about 60 seconds at this link (no optin required). There’s a short video on that page explaining how to interpret the report.

Note that you’ll need to have somewhere in the range of 100-200 visits a day to have enough traffic to generate this report.

If you have a new site or are under the traffic threshold, try our free site speed test tool SiteSpeedBot. It’s also free and in 90 seconds or so, will give you detailed recommendations on what you need to do to speed up your site.

If you’re looking for help with your site speed, submit an audit request at the top of this page with the details of the specific problems you’re looking to solve and one of our team will review your site and tell you how we can help.

Our Site Speed Audit, Consult & Implementation service is our most popular service and usually the best fit if you’re looking for a comprehensive service – there’s a walkthrough video and several screenshots that explain’s our approach and methodology.

How Can We Help You?

Check your Core Web Vitals

Get a detailed Core Web Vitals report & see how your site is performing in the real world.

Get a FREE site speed audit

Find out how our site speed services can help you with a free site audit and review performed by one of our team

The FASTEST WordPress Hosting

A fast site starts with fast hosting, these are the fastest hosts we’ve found & use ourselves

Test your site speed

Get detailed insights & recommendations on your site speed, for free, in under 90 seconds with our AI powered WordPress speed test tool

Get site speed help from our team

Learn more about our Audit, Consult & Implementation Service, our most popular speed optimization service

Get SEO help from our team

Get a detailed SEO action plan with our Technical & Onpage SEO audit service

Our Done-For-You SEO & Site Speed Optimization Services

$ 39/month

WordPress Maintenance
& Support Plans, from $39/mo

Includes speed optimization!

Our WordPress Maintenance Service & Support Plans are designed from the ground up to have you loading lightning fast, pass Google’s Core Web Vitals, rank you higher and more customers

  • Core Web Vitals Optimization included
  • Hourly backups, daily WordPress patching, 24/7 uptime monitoring
  • High speed hosting included
  • SEO plugin best practices
  • DIY SEO Audit tools and recommendations built in
  • Monthly core web vitals speed reports (if your site has enough traffic to support them)

$ 495

Simple Speed Optimization

Our Simple Optimization Service is our low cost optimization service designed for new and low traffic sites that need speed optimization but don’t necessarily need a deep dive audit or have the budget to support a deep dive audit.

  • sitewide optimization which is key for core web vitals
  • a focus on improving the key web vitals metrics, TTFB, FCP, LCP, CLS, FID & Javascript
  • best for established sites looking for a fix to core web vitals issues

*Not recommended for sites that are highly monetized or that cannot tolerate downtime – if your site has low risk tolerance we recommend our consult service where implementation risks can be discussed in advance.

$ 795

Site Speed Audit, Consult & Implementation

Our Site Speed Audit, Consult & Implementation is for sites that want to go as fast as absolutely possible or where some optimization has been done but it’s not enough. With this service we do an upfront audit and analysis, create a detailed set of recommendations and action plan and then schedule in a consult call to discuss in detail and plan the implementation with you.

Our team can do the work directly or work with your existing team to deploy it.

  • upfront full site analysis and audit
  • detailed recommendations and action plan created before any implementation performed
  • consult call to discuss action items in detail
  • implementation can be done for you or done in conjunction with your team
  • best for sites that are well monetized and want to pass core web vitals too

$ 2495

Technical & Onpage SEO Audit

So many of the sites we see and work on have big SEO gaps and are sitting on huge untapped SEO opportunity. This is a bundle service that includes our site speed consultation and a technical SEO audit.

  • includes full site speed consult service AND detailed SEO analysis, audit and recommendations
  • recommended if better SEO and organic traffic is your ultimate goal

Customer Results & What To Expect

In the past, typically most of our customers that purchased our WordPress Speed Optimization services will saw the load time of their site drop to somewhere between the 1-2.5 second mark.

Most started at somewhere between 5-10 seconds, often more although many customers don’t necessarily have a slow website, they just want it optimized and loading as fast as possible.

That said, with the release of Google’s Core Web Vitals Metrics in mid 2020, site speed is much more multi-dimensional than a simple speed test of a homepage.

Our optimization work today is focussed on improving several key site speed metrics and timings including DNS resolution speed, TTFB, FCP timing, LCP timing, load time/document complete time, page weight as well as the traditional fully loaded time metric.

Site uptime and reliability is a key element of a consistently fast loading site so we’ve now also incorporated some site security optimizations in our services too.

In terms of site speed goals and what to expect, we ideally we want our speed timings looking something like this:

TTFB at 0.1-0.2 seconds in the country where the site is hosted and 0.2-0.5 internationally.

FCP (first contentful paint) which is when the site starts to appear (i.e. render) to the visitor at or under 1.5 seconds

LCP (largest contentful paint) which is when the site render is mostly complete, under 4 seconds but ideally as close to the LCP as possible, generally within 1 second of the LCP is fast.

Load time (document complete) at 1.5-2.5 seconds

Fully loaded, which is a more traditional speed metric although not so relevant in 2020 and beyond, can vary a lot depending on the third party code being used. This is still the metric that many popular tools like GTMetrix focus on.

Generally we’d expect to see this timing 1-2 second higher than the load time but this largely depends on the type of site. For example, with a Woocommerce site this could easily be 3-5 seconds higher depending on the marketing code in use.

With every site we work on, we do before and after speed tests. With our higher level services we test your entire site because the speed, and particularly the size of all pages is important. Below are some recent results our customers have seen.

If you want to see how fast or slow your site is right now and get some insights into where your site speed could be improved, our speed test tool is completely free, takes less than 60 seconds and will uncover speed optimizations and opportunities no other tool on the market currently probes for!

Head SiteSpeedBot.com and try it for yourself (do 2-3 tests to get an accurate average load speed).

Page Size

1.0 MB

Number of Requests

23

Load Time

0.972s

LCP Timing

1.197s

Tested from

San Jose

Just under one second for this blog hosted on the entry level Siteground hosting plan. Pretty fast for what would be considered cheap hosting.

Page Size

0.96 MB

Number of Requests

120

Load Time

0.689s

LCP Timing

0.998s

Tested from

San Jose

A great result here for a real estate broker with a fairly image heavy site.

Page Size

0.79 MB

Number of Requests

66

Load Time

0.709s

LCP Timing

1.002s

Tested from

San Jose

This site is running Woocommerce which can be very resource hungry but still a great result.

Reviews & Testimonials

WP Speed Fix provided us with amazing customer service and completed all tasks on time!I worked with Ash form the WP Speed Fix Team, who is a structured and well organised professional. He was always there when we needed assistance and promptly responded with helpful information, action or guidance to help complete the task at hand.Some time after the work was completed we asked Ash for additional information to help us solve a current issue. Ash promptly responeded and helped us solve the issue by providing guidance. Ash responded quickly and professionaly even though that was not part of the previous project scope!We would definitely recommend working with WP Speed Fix. Professional and on time delivery and a team of experts that provide great customer service!
I worked with Ash who is an amazing guy who quickly made a great plan and helped us fix our site speed. We experienced some issues a few months later after a Wordpress update and he quickly helped us solve those issues. Overall, I'm very satisfied with their service! 🙂
I’ve gone through about 6 companies that claim they can fix CWV with no success. I was referred to WP Speed Fix by a friend, and not only did they fix my CWV, they made sure my site blew away my competition. I cannot be happier with the results. I was extremely hesitant to hire them at first because of my horrible experiences with other companies, but I am beyond glad I gave them a shot.The bottom line is, if you want your core web vitals fixed, you need to hire these guys.
Great work by Ash would highly recommend very fast response times and great customer service
Delivered WELL above and beyond what was promised/expectedThey did excellent job and went with me in detail about what they did and how it will help the site in terms of speed and ranking for CLSI am really happy and cant recommend WP Speed Fix enough!Plan to use again!
In the digital marketing industry, it’s important to find allies and people who you can rely on if you ever run into SEO problems you can’t solve on your own. WP Speed Fix has been incredible thus far. We have worked on multiple projects together, and they have helped to significantly boost our clients’ website speed. They have provided in-depth, ongoing consulting, to make sure everything was dialed in. Most recently, I asked Brendan about an SEO problem we ran into for one of our clients’ websites and he came back with an incredibly detailed, helpful and most importantly, accurate insight into the problem. I will absolutely be turning to WP speed fix in the future for any technical SEO, and page speed optimization needs.
I'd absolutely recommend WP Speed Fix to anyone wanting to speed up their Wordpress website. We have struggled for years to get our busy site faster, yet within just a week of Brendan and the team working their magic, our site is now lightning fast. Very professional and quick to respond to emails... these guys know what they're doing. Thanks for all the work.
Overall fantastic experience. Increased our website speed drastically.
Brendan and Ash are top-notch guys who not only are experts at Wordpress and site speed, but they also know SEO and how site speed plays into it.Brendan got me going and showed me my site's CRUX reports and other things and setup an action plan for me based on what my site was deficient in. Then Ash stepped in and made the plan a reality! He also had a bunch of insights and recommendations that I've never heard before on the various SEO and webmaster blogs.Best of all, my site's scores are all now in the 90 percentile and we still have the CDN to enable! Also, there was no downtime or anything broken on the site like I was expecting. Great job guys! I will be referring you to my friends and business partners.
Couldn't recommend this service enough. A brilliant engineer called Ash went above and beyond to optimise our website and fix any problems that arose whilst being super responsive the whole time. Thanks to his hard work, our website has gone from an F on various ranking sites to an A.
Awesome, quick service that just works. Highly recommended!
Joao and the rest of the WP Speed Fix team has delivered stellar results in a timely manner. And admittedly, I probably wasn't the easiest client. I run a blog built off Elementor (notoriously clunky). Even so, Joao took care to investigate a bunch of issues and was patient with me and my many questions along the way.Since I'm located in the US, time zones were a bit of an 'annoyance' , but Joao was quite responsive and at the end of the day, the results they delivered far outweighed any time inconvenience.This has made my life a lot easier, and boy, I found their price point to be a good value. I've already referred a friend to WP Speed Fix -- big thanks to Joao and the team! :)(I voluntarily completed this review and receive nothing in compensation -- I'm just quick to give praise when it's due).
The WP Speed Fix team has earned my complete confidence and trust! They are the best web-related company I've ever hired for my business. I wish I could give them more than 5 stars!
I used WP Speed Fix to migrate my website and resolve some UX issues. A great service and Ash from their team went above and beyond with helping me resolve one issue that was not covered under the original work.I would certainly recommend WP Speed Fix – great service.
Our initial engagement was to help us optimise the speed of our website without compromising its impact. The team were professional and responsive when we first engaged in 2020 and have continued to be so ever since.
These guys helped us optimise and improve website performance in no time at all. Great job. Support side of the business is also very responsive as well.
Simply an outstanding service that was completely above and beyond any and every expectation. We even had issues months later with errors that were resolved with unbelievable levels of professionalism and expertise. I cannot recommend or thank WP Speed Fix enough.World Class.
Ash has been absolutely brilliant with helping get our website back online. Highly recommended!!
Professional service, easy to communicate with and they did the job of speeding up our site. Highly recommended.
We had a website that was loading terribly slowly. WP Speed Fix, and specifically Ash who worked on our site, were incredible. Not only did they increase our speed site over 90%, Ash was patient and knowledgeable, and really went above and beyond for us. Couldn't recommend them more! Thank you!!
Ash from WP Speed Fix went over and beyond in helping me to speed up my website. The process was also very informative so I've learned a trick or two on how to maintain a fast site. I am so impressed by their service so I'll be telling my biz friends all about them and will definitely use them again for other websites. Well worth it. Thanks again Ash.
I reached out to WP Speed Fix for two websites. Both website were slow, and given that I'm a pro photographer, image quality was of great importance to me. I didn't want a website that was pure text and fast; I wanted a site that looked great and performed very well.Both sites are performing as promised by WP Speed Fix, and Ash went above and beyond for me. Tackling constant issues with my website I cannot say enough good things about WP Speed Fix and the way they stepped up to the challenges.Thank you Ash, I have sincerely appreciated your patience and increasing the speed of sites as promised.
Wow! I had several previous experience with different companies in order to improve my site speed. Every single time I got answers like: you have too many plugins in your Worpdress installation, you need to cut down in order to improve speed or it is you host provided that is the issue, you should change if you want to get more speed, etc.I was very, very sceptical about WP Speed Fix. But, I must admit Ash for WP Speed Fix went above and beyond in order to improve my site. No excuses, just improvements. He really improve my site to best it could be, did a way better job than any previous company combined.I will most assurely do a once a year maintenance-overlook with WP Speed Fix. Worth every cent. Highly recommended.
Speedy service. Exceptional communication. Listened to my needs. Fixed everything and more! Can't say enough wonderful things about this company. Thank you for your help!!!!
I operate a continuing medical education company. WPSpeedFix has come to our rescue TWICE and both times has fixed our server / speed / application issues with efficiency and speed. They are responsive, wonderful professionals to work with. They are WordPress experts, as well as experts in all things website related. I trust them completely.
I worked with Ash with TikTokFollowing.com, originally my site was incredibly slow. He managed to sort out all of my Core Web Vitals whilst educating me along the way. Best WP optimisation service out there, also their after sales support is incredible, It got to the point where I felt bad and wanted to send them more ££ as they done so much work for me and didn't stop until I was pleased. Will be bringing a few more sites your way, thank you WP Speed fix a big 5* to you!
I was really impressed with these guys. I hired them to speed up our website and not only was that done really fast and professionally, but they continued to help me with some slightly unrelated issues that popped up later on. They really helped me out in a bind. I almost never leave reviews, but these guys are solid and deserve it. I wouldn't hesitate to recommend them to anyone.
Really impressed with the service we got from Brendan & the team. Great results, easy to work with, fast turn-around. Highly recommended.
It's hard to find companies that truly go above and beyond to make sure that you as a customer get what you have paid for nowadays. Brendan and his team did everything they could to make sure I as a customer was satisfied. So much so, that I am now switching my monthly services fully over to them from my current hosting company.Cant recommend Brendan and his team enough as you know that they know exactly what they are talking about and extremely experienced in their field.ThanksAllan!
I've had great results with the WP Speed Fix team. They over delivered and did so on the promised schedule. Great work!
Great team to work with! Communication was exceptional. They performed a miracle with bringing our site down from 6 sec load time to under 1 sec! Highly recommend and will use again in future! Cheers Brendan & Ned!
Amazing experience, Brendan and his team are super knowledgeable and know what they are doing! They work very professional and they are 100% reliable!! I got great results and even after the job was done they were still open to help out and answer questions. I can highly recommend them!
Great results with these folks - many thanks to Brendan and the team!
Great service. Good customer care. Website Speed result as advertised. Highly recommended.
I'm a happy customer. They improved site speed as advertised.
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What Do We Do As Part Of Our Site Speed Optimization Work?

There are 150+ items in our process, some make a huge difference to site speed, others are
minor optimizations or only matter in edge cases.

We can do a whole range of things and also offer several services in addition to site speed optimization.
Some of the specific things we can do are listed below.
Please note that these are not provided with all our services so if there’s something specific on this list you want help with, please reach out and ask.

  • Optimization Of Your WordPress Website On Your Existing Hosting
  • Browser Caching Configuration & Tuning
  • Page Caching Configuration & Tuning
  • CSS & Javascript (JS) Optimization, Tuning, Minification & Combining As Supported By Your Theme
  • Database Optimization, Cleanup & Scheduled Maintenance Implementation
  • SQL Server Tuning (if you’re on a VPS and we have access)
  • 301 Redirect Optimization
  • Before and After Backups (using Blogvault)
  • .HTACCESS File Optimization
  • Theme Optimization As Far As Your Theme Supports
  • WordPress Plugin Updates & Patching As Required
  • Plugin Review & Pruning As Required
  • Server Compression Tuning As Required
  • HTTPS Implementation for HTTP2 Protocol Support AND Better SEO (if you’re not already on HTTPS)
  • PHP 7.x Upgrade
  • PHP Tuning As Required
  • TTFB Optimization where required
  • 404 Error Analysis & Rectification
  • Cloudflare CDN Setup & Implementation for Lightning Fast Worldwide Load Times & Fast DNS Hosting (optional but strongly recommended)
  • DNS Record Optimization & Tuning For Speed
  • Google Tag Manager Setup & Implementation (strongly recommended if you have Livechat or a lot of 3rd party tags)
  • Livechat Lazy Loading Configuration
  • Image & Video Lazy Loading Configuration (if appropriate for your theme)
  • Advanced Image Compression and Optimization With Support For .Webp Next Generation Image File Format
  • WordPress General Best Practices Review & Implementation
  • Advanced Optimization – Page Prefetching & Just In Time Preloading
  • Advanced Database & Object Caching Implementation *IF Your Hosting Supports Memcached or Redis Memory Caching
  • Advanced Edge Caching For Lightning Fast Worldwide Load Times & Lower TTFB Using Cloudflare’s APO Service (if supported by the type of site you have)
  • Optional Server or Hosting Migration
  • Optimization for Google’s Core Web Vitals Metrics
  • Sitewide Page Weight Testing As the Size Of All Your Pages Matter
  • Page or Specific Problem Troubleshooting & Rectification Such As Fixing Slow Woocommerce Cart & Checkout Operations or Fixing A Slow Wordpress Backend Admin Panel.
  • Rectification Of Intermittent Problems & Edge Case Issues
  • VPS Server Tuning
  • Server Log File Analysis
  • Malware Removal & Hacked Site Repair
  • Site Speed Consulting For Complex Environments With High Uptime Requirements
  • Monthly WordPress Maintenance Services
  • We Can Also Work In Conjunction With Your Existing Development Team To Deploy Changes or Deploy First On Staging (with our consulting service)
  • Optional SEO & SEM Advisory and Consulting Services

How to Get Started

Question before getting started? Try the live chat in the bottom right hand corner of the page or email
questions@wpspeedfix.com, or submit an audit request at the top of the page.
We aim to respond to enquiries within 1 business day

Ready to get started? Here’s the next steps…

Choose which option you want from the table above and hit the Order Now button & complete the checkout process.
If you’re not sure where to start submit an audit request at the top of this page.

Once the checkout process is complete you’ll have an onboarding form with a handful of questions as well as the list of logons we need.

Complete the onboarding doc with as much detail as possible.

Once we get your reply one of the team will do an initial assessment on your site and maybe have further questions for you. If not, our team will get started on the work.

We fix your speed problems and optimize your site so it’s running as fast as possible!

Website Speed Optimization Guides & How To’s

Below are answers to some of the most commonly asked questions with detailed guides and insights on how to solve for various speed optimization problems. Check out our full site speed optimization guides page for more how-to guides.

How To Speed Up & Optimize WordPress Database Queries

In this post, we’re going to break down and share how we optimize the WordPress database and database queries when working on site speed.

How To Improve First Contentful Paint

How To Improve Your First Contentful Paint (Under 1 Second!)

FCP stands for First Contentful Paint. Without getting too deep into tech stuff, it’s the time at which the first element or piece of content on your page shows to the visitor. In this post we’ll share a simple technique for getting this timing under 1 second.

How To Reduce Server Response Times (Aka Ttfb)

How To Reduce Server Response Time Or TTFB (Time To First Byte)

In this article we’ll share the troubleshooting steps for reducing “server response times” aka TTFB or time to first byte and recommendations for improving this metric we’ve developed after optimizing 4000+ WordPress sites.

How To Improve Largest Contentful Paint

How To Reduce & Improve Your Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) Timing

In this article we break down exactly how to reduce and improve your LCP timing which is arguably one of the most important site speed metrics for both traffic and conversions.

Speed Optimization Without Plugins

How To Optimize WordPress Speed WITHOUT Plugins

We get asked about how to optimize WordPress speed without plugins more often than you’d expect. And there are valid reasons why some site admins want to do WordPress speed optimization without plugins – some sites are on a complex multisite installation, or have extremely high traffic and more plugins mean more complexity.

How To Fix The “Avoid Enormous Network Payloads” Warning

How To Fix The ‘Avoid Enormous Network Payload’ Warning In Google Pagespeed Insights

When testing your site page’s performance with Google Pagespeed Insights, you might encounter this “Avoid Enormous Network Payload” warning.

The Fastest Themes, Hosting, Tools & More

We get hundreds of questions each week asking for recommendations on hosting, themes, and tools. Below you’ll find out the tools, hosting, and themes we recommend and why

The Fastest &Amp; Best Woocommerce Themes

Fastest WooCommerce Themes

As You Know Site Speed Is Critically Important For Ecommerce SEO & Conversions, In This Post We Share the FASTEST Themes for Woocommerce in 2024.

Fastest Wordpress Hosting

Fastest WooCommerce Hosting

Fast Hosting Is Essential For WooCommerce – In This Post We Share The FASTEST WooCommerce Hosts We’ve Found After 4000+ Site Speed Optimizations & Why.

The Fastest Shopify Themes In Detail

Fastest Shopify Themes

After Optimizing 1000s of Websites, In This Post We Break Down The FASTEST Shopify Templates & Themes in 2024 and Why We Recommend Them.

Fastest Wordpress Hosting

Fastest WordPress Hosting

Most Wordpress Hosting Is Slow & Unreliable. In This Article We Share The Top 6 FASTEST Wordpress Hosts WORLDWIDE And Explain Why We Use Them & Trust Them.

The-Fastest-Wordpress-Theme

Fastest WordPress Themes

We’ve Optimized 4000+ Sites For Speed, In This Post We Share the FASTEST & Best WordPress Themes for Speed.

Frequently Asked Questions

Here are some of the most commonly asked questions about our service.

What logons will you need from me?

The logons we need are a WordPress administrator level password, FTP or Cpanel access and domain registrar logon for your Cloudflare migration.

If you’re not comfortable sharing your domain registrar logon (which is completely understandable) we can give you the DNS servers to point your domain at once we’re ready to switch over to Cloudflare

We’ll typically also need Google Tag Manager access as often we move 3rd party embed codes to GTM. If you already have a Cloudflare account we’ll usually need access to that to review settings and tweak accordingly.

Can I get a detailed list of changes you make?

We have over 150 steps in our process so it’s impractical to give you finite detail on everything we do.

If you have a large site that’s mission critical we recommend you look at the Consult Service. With this service we audit the site to start with, create a detailed action plan and then work with you on the implementation of the plan. This service provides the most detail on changes we make.

Generally the first step in our process is to identify the key problems that are slowing your site down, fix them and then work on general best practices. We’ll explain what these problems are and give you an explanation of why they’re problematic as well as provide before and after speed reports.

More broadly, here are the things we do:

WordPress Best Practices Review & Optimization
Most sites we work on have configuration errors or problems simply because the sites have been worked on by several people over time. We review your entire site and hosting configuration and ensure it’s configured in a best practices fashion.

Browser & Page Caching Configuration & Tuning
Caching is one of biggest improvements you can make to your WordPress site speed. Caching setup is a lot more complex than simply installing a caching plugin and turning everything on.

Each site is different and as such caching needs to be customized specifically to each site. On top of that, often caching settings are counter intuitive and on some hosts turning on things like Database Caching will actually slow your site down.

You’ll also find that many of the improvements that speed test tools on the web recommend such as removing query strings from static elements can actually create problems.

Database Optimization & Cleanup
If your site has been around for a while there may be garbage in the database that is slowing it down. For example, expired transients on Woocommerce sites can be a huge problem as well as using the older MyISAM storage engine for database tables.

As part of our service we cleanup and optimize your database to ensure it’s running as fast as possible.

Redis or Memcached Object Cache setup (where possible)

Object caching is a type of database caching that speeds up areas such as the WordPress backend, Woocommerce checkout and generally anything in WordPress that relies heavily on CPU or database lookups. Not all hosts support object caching but where possible we’ll get either Memcached or Redis installed and configure Object Caching.

Edge Caching setup using Cloudflare

Edge caching is a type of page caching where the site or pages are cached on CDN edge nodes. This significantly reduces the load on your hosting and largely eliminates the impact of geography on your site speed. We strongly recommend all compatible sites use the Cloudflare APO Edge Caching service. It’s $5/USD month (purchased from Cloudflare) but makes a significant impact on site speed.

HTAccess File Optimization
HTAccess is one of your web server’s key configuration files and it often contains code that is slowing you down or causing problems in some way. We review your HTAccess configuration and ensure that it’s configured in a best practices format.

404 & Bad Request Review & Repair
It’s not unusual to find spelling errors in code or some other issue that is causing images or break or bad requests to your server. We review all elements that you site loads to ensure they’re not timing out or resulting in a 404 error.

Plugin Review & Pruning
Duplicated and outdated plugins are a huge problem when it comes to WordPress speed. Often this is something as simple as having multiple SEO plugins installed which is bad for both speed AND your Google rankings.

We review all your plugin to make sure they’re actually all required or being used, that none are providing duplicate functionality or causing conflicts somewhere in your site.

Server Compression Tuning
Many website servers don’t have compression turned on by default. We make sure your server compression settings are tuned for maximum performance.

Before and After Reports
We all the work we do we take before and after speed snapshots so we can show you exactly what improvements to site speed have been achieved.

Image Optimization & Compression and NextGen Image Optimization
Images are usually the largest component or your website and by using lossless compression we can often significantly reduce the size of your image files without any difference to the quality.

We losslessly compress all images on your site and will also resize images where appropriate.

Content Delivery Network Setup (optional, powered by Cloudflare)
Cloudflare.com is a fantastic service and we recommend it to all customers (even the free service will give you a significant speed boost).

Cloudflare speeds up your DNS hosting (very commonly overlooked when it comes to speed), provides a content delivery network and several other acceleration features that no other provider or plugin offers.

HTTPS conversion if you’re not running HTTPS yet (you should be!)
The entire web is moving to HTTPS and it’s a good thing too. HTTPS ensures all data transmitted between your website and your visitors is encrypted.

When your site runs in HTTPS web browsers will use the newer HTTP2 protocol which requires less connections to the server and overall improves the render and load speed of your site.

As well as speed up your site, Google have stated that encrypted sites running in HTTPS will get a slight rankings boost.

PHP7 upgrade (if compatible)
PHP7 is the latest version of PHP and is 2-3x faster than PHP5.X which is the version of PHP your website is probably running (there’s no PHP6). This translates to approximately 0.5 seconds faster load time which is great for getting under that 1 second total load.

Each subsequent PHP version is faster than the last, so v7.1 is 10-20% faster than 7.0, v7.2 is 10-20% faster than 7.1 and so forth so running the highest PHP version possible will give you the fastest possible speed.

I need more than one site fixed, can I have a discount?

Each speedfix service covers a single site, we do offer bulk discounts if you need several sites worked on. You can see the various discounts in the checkout << click the link and then click the bulk order link at the top of the checkout.

Can you work on WordPress Multisite networks?

Sometimes, not always. It depends how many sites you have in your network. We count each site on your network as a standalone site so you’ll need to purchase a Speed Fix service for each site you want fixed. Some of the changes we make as part of our speed optimizations will have an impact
on your entire network (a positive impact).

If you have a question about your multisite environment, shoot us an email at questions@wpspeedfix.com and we can discuss in more detail.

How do you check site speed?

We weren’t happy with the speed test tools on the market so we built our own!

Check it out at SiteSpeedBot.com

In the past we used Pingdom and GTMetrix and while they’re both good tools, they had huge gaps in their recommendations. GTMetrix servers can bequite slow and report slower load times that they should.

We also use Google Pagespeed Insights or Google Lighthouse.

Typically we focus on improving Core Web Vitals metrics and related speed timings.

Ideally we want our speed timings looking something like this:

-TTFB 0.1-0.2 seconds (this is where is should be in the country where the site is hosted, 0.2-0.5 internationally)
-FCP at or under 1.5 second
-LCP under 2.5 seconds but ideally as close to the LCP as possible, generally within 1 second of the LCP is fast
-load time 1.5-3 seconds
-fully loaded time can vary a lot depending on the third party code being used. Generally we’d expect to see it 1-2 second higher than the load time but this largely depends on the type of site, eg with a Woocommerce site this could easily be 3-5 seconds higher depending on the marketing code in use

Can you get me XYZ score in Google Pagespeed Insights?

You’re asking the wrong question!

A 100 score in Pagespeed Insights is not the goal you should be aiming for. Instead, Google Core Web vitals metrics is where your focus should be which are the timings Google uses in it’s algorithm and are what show up in Google Search Console and at the top of the Pagespeed Insights test in the “field data” section.

Most people looking at Pagespeed Insights scores are looking at the homepage only (in reality, all your pages matter) and test from one location, one time only.

Pagespeed Insights score is not a fixed score, it varies on each test. It’s a metric computed from the load time scores at the time of the test.

Ideally we want our speed timings looking something like this in order to get a “good” score in core web vitals:

-TTFB 0.1-0.2 seconds (this is where is should be in the country where the site is hosted, 0.2-0.5 internationally)
-FCP at or under 1.5 second
-LCP under 2.5 seconds but ideally as close to the LCP as possible, generally within 1 second of the LCP is fast
-load time 1.5-2.5
-fully loaded time can vary a lot depending on the third party code being used. Generally we’d expect to see it 1-2 second higher than the load time but this largely depends on the type of site, eg with a Woocommerce site this could easily be 3-5 seconds higher depending on the marketing code in use

Note that the mobile test on Pagespeed Insights is testing on a slow device using a 1.6mb/second connection (very slow) which means that unless your page size in a 0.5mb or below you will not score above approximately 60 out of 100 on this test.

On our Advanced Speedfix we focus on the size of all pages across the site as well as specifically focusing on Pagespeed Score. We cannot guarantee a 100 score because as per above, the score heavily depends on the size of the page tested. Anyone promising you a 100 score is either lying to you or will want you to remove all content from your pages.

Do I need to move hosting companies?

That depends but quite often you will. We migrate hosting for roughly 30% of our customers.

If you’re using Bluehost, Godaddy, Hostgator, A Small Orange or any other EIG owned company you’ll probably need to move to get your site
loading super fast. The only way cheap companies make any money on those $3/month hosting plans is to stack 10,000 other websites on the same
server and run the server as hard as possible.

We find that we can get sites running on these services down to a passable 3-5 second load time BUT the site will struggle to handle more than a handful of simultaneous users at a time.

When it comes to hosting you get what you pay for – it’s unreasonable to expect a high quality service when you pay more for a coffee than you do for an entire month of hosting or 1-2 clicks on your Adwords or Facebook
ads.

Typically we’ll recommend Cloudways for customers on a poor quality web host but any of the hosts on our Fastest WordPress Hosting list will have your site loading fast.

Using a content delivery network like Cloudflare will help a lot as it picks up a lot of slack from the hosting and using their $5/month APO edge caching service will take this to the next level. If you cannot move hosting providers for whatever reason this is probably the next best thing.

My Woocommerce site is slow, can you fix that?

Yes!

Nearly half the sites we work on are Woocommerce sites that are running slowly.

If you’re on Bluehost, Godaddy, Hostgator, A Small Orange or any other hosting company owned by EIG you’ll probably need to upgrade to get
consistently fast speeds especially fast checkout, cart and My Account section as well as things like Add to Cart function.

Typically we recommend CloudWays for Woocommerce hosting but any of the hosts on our Fastest WordPress Hosts list are appropriate.

Are there any sites you can’t fix?

Yes, occasionally we get a site that we can’t fix. Usually the site has one of the issues listed below. In many cases we can work with you to resolve the issue. Most often the issue is related to the hosting the site is sitting on and in that case we can advise what needs to be done to resolve the problem and can migrate the site for you.

If we hit a major roadblock after you order that means we can’t speed up your site we’re happy give you a refund on your service.

It’s running on a Windows server.

While WordPress can run on Windows it’s designed to run on a Linux or LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) system which means you’ll never get a Windows server to perform as well as a LAMP setup. If site speed matters to you the site should not be running on a Windows server.

It’s running on a complex WordPress Multisite setup

Wordpress Multisite isn’t the best for performance, especially if you’re running a Multisite setup with a huge number of plugins or large number of sites. Multisite is often more convenient but the tradeoff is flexibility and sometimes performance.

The site is running on a VPS and the VPS has issues

Fixing VPS and server issues is outside the scope of what we do. The speed of your WordPress site is limited by how well the server is configured and most cheap VPS setups are poorly configured. Unless you have a specific reason to use a VPS, a managed WordPress host is often a better option because the server has been configured and tuned specifically for WordPress.

The hosting plan is poor quality

Your site is not going to perform if you’re on bargain basement hosting. There’s no way around this, cheap hosting is poor quality, ultimately you get what you pay for. As part of our service we can migrate you to a better quality host.

You have too much traffic for your hosting plan 

Your hosting plan needs to be matched well to the level of traffic your site is getting. If you’re getting 5000 visits a day you’re going to need to be on a higher grade hosting plan that a site that gets 50 visits a day. Using tools like Cloudflare will dramatically improve performance for high traffic sites but at the end of the day your site speed is limited by the performance cap on your hosting. In cases like this quite often the solution is to move up to the next level hosting plan.

The IT department wants to host the site internally

IT departments are generally not commercially motivated and aren’t focussed on what’s best for business – after all, if things run smoothly they have nothing to do, if they have nothing to do then they don’t have a job. Often an internal IT department will want to host the site internally rather than using a dedicated WordPress host that can do a far better job. If your site is hosted on internal IT infrastructure then we might be limited in how we can help.

Your site has custom dev work done or is running an obscure or poor quality plugin

Occasionally we come across a site that has had custom development work done that is very poor quality or is running a WordPress plugin that conflicts with other plugins or is simply just rubbish. Most often in these cases the plugin or development work is trying to do something WordPress was not designed to do and it’s breaking the site or causing performance issues.