A slow website frustrates visitors and hurts your Google rankings. The good news is that most WordPress speed problems can be fixed with a few simple changes.
Start with good hosting
Cheap, overloaded servers are the most common cause of slow sites. Choose a host with modern PHP and server-level caching.
Use a lightweight theme
Heavy multipurpose themes load a lot of code you never use. A clean, lightweight theme gives you a better starting point.
The 10-step checklist
- Update WordPress, themes and plugins
- Remove unused plugins
- Enable page caching
- Compress and resize images
- Serve images in WebP format
- Lazy load images and videos
- Minify CSS and JavaScript
- Use a CDN such as Cloudflare
- Clean up your database
- Test with PageSpeed Insights and repeat
Measure before and after
Run a speed test before you change anything, then test again after each step so you know what actually helped.
If you want the fastest possible result, consider moving to a static site, which we cover in our WordPress vs Astro comparison.