Is your WordPress website slow? It is worth learning how to speed up WordPress, because every second of delay has real consequences. Google research from 2016 found that 53% of mobile visits are abandoned when a page takes longer than 3 seconds to load. Amazon once calculated that every 100 milliseconds of delay cost it 1% of sales. Speed is a Google ranking factor, and it has a direct effect on how many visitors become customers.
These are the 12 steps that make the biggest difference. You can start applying them today. The guide suits beginners as well as owners of established sites. If you are just getting started, read our complete WordPress guide before moving on to these optimisation techniques.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- Google research from 2016 found that 53% of mobile visits are abandoned when a page takes longer than 3 seconds to load.
- The 12 steps cover hosting, caching, CDN, images and the database, which are the areas with the biggest impact.
- WP Rocket and LiteSpeed Cache are currently the leading caching plugins for WordPress.
- The WebP image format can cut file size by 25-34% compared with JPEG without losing quality.
- A PageSpeed score of 90+ is achievable with fast hosting, a CDN and the right caching setup.
RELATED READING
- How to Build a WordPress Website from Scratch
- Core Web Vitals 2026: A Guide to Optimising Website Speed
- How to Secure Your WordPress Website from Hackers
Why WordPress speed matters for SEO and conversions
Page speed has been an official Google ranking factor since 2010 for desktop and since 2018 for mobile. Data from Portent shows that conversion rates drop by an average of 4.42% for every extra second of load time between the first and fifth seconds (Portent, 2022). Put simply, a slow website costs you money.
Google now uses Core Web Vitals as a ranking signal. The three main metrics are Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Interaction to Next Paint (INP) and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). Websites that meet the “Good” threshold for all three have a ranking advantage over slower competitors.
The business impact is even more concrete. A Walmart study found that every 1-second improvement in load time increased conversions by 2% (Google Web Dev Case Studies, 2022). For an online shop, the gap between a 2-second and a 4-second website can be worth millions of rupiah a month.
How to measure your current WordPress speed
Before you optimise anything, you need to know where you stand. Google PageSpeed Insights is the most accurate free tool because it uses real field data from Chrome users. A score of 90-100 counts as “good”, 50-89 as “needs improvement” and anything below 50 as “poor” (Google Developers, 2024).
These are the three tools we use most when auditing client websites:
- Google PageSpeed Insights (pagespeed.web.dev): free, based on real user data, and suited to checking Core Web Vitals.
- GTmetrix (gtmetrix.com): detailed reports with a waterfall chart, ideal for finding specific bottlenecks.
- WebPageTest (webpagetest.org): runs tests from many server locations, useful for in-depth analysis.
Note your starting score before you change anything, so you have something to compare against later.Test three pages: your homepage, a category page and your most popular product page or article.
12 proven ways to speed up WordPress
The twelve steps are ordered by impact and implementation priority. They start with the foundation, your hosting, and work up to more specific technical layers. Each step stands on its own, so you can apply them one at a time at whatever pace suits your technical skills.
Step 1: Choose fast WordPress hosting
Hosting is the foundation everything else sits on, and no plugin can fix a slow server. Choose hosting that uses NVMe SSDs, PHP 8.x and servers in Indonesia or Singapore to keep latency low. Here is a quick comparison of popular hosting options in Indonesia:
| Hosting | Server type | LiteSpeed | Location | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Niagahoster | LiteSpeed | Yes | Indonesia | Small businesses, blogs, portfolios |
| Cloudways | Apache/Nginx | No | Singapore | Developers, agencies |
| SiteGround | Nginx + Apache | No | Singapore | Mid-sized businesses |
| Kinsta | Google Cloud C2 | No | Jakarta (GCP) | Enterprise websites |
LiteSpeed-based hosting gives you two advantages: a faster server and full compatibility with the free LiteSpeed Cache plugin. That combination often outperforms an Nginx + WP Rocket setup that costs far more.
Step 2: Turn on caching (WP Rocket or LiteSpeed Cache)
Caching stores a static version of your pages, so the server does not have to run PHP and query the database for every new visitor. It is the single most effective step in WordPress optimisation. WP Rocket is the most popular premium caching plugin, with more than 3 million active installations (WP Rocket, 2024).
On LiteSpeed-based hosting, use LiteSpeed Cache, which is free and more efficient because it works at server level. On Nginx or Apache hosting, WP Rocket (paid, around $59/year) is the best choice. Turn on page caching, browser caching and object caching together for the best results.
Step 3: Compress and resize images (Smush or ShortPixel)
Unoptimised images are the biggest single cause of slow websites. HTTP Archive reports that images account for 45% of total page weight on average (HTTP Archive, 2024). Compression can cut file sizes by 50-80% with no visible difference.
Two plugins stand out for automatic compression: Smush (free, limited to 50 images per batch) and ShortPixel (paid, from $9.99/month, with more aggressive compression). Both compress images on upload and offer bulk compression for older images. Resize images to the largest size your theme actually displays. There is no point uploading a 4000px photo if the content column is only 800px wide.
Step 4: Turn on a CDN (Cloudflare)
A CDN (Content Delivery Network) distributes your website's static files to servers around the world. A visitor in Surabaya downloads assets from the nearest server instead of from your hosting server in Jakarta or Singapore. Cloudflare is the most popular CDN, with a network of more than 330 locations in 120+ countries (Cloudflare, 2024).
Cloudflare's free plan already includes the CDN, free SSL, basic DDoS protection and Rocket Loader for JavaScript. On WordPress, add the official Cloudflare plugin so the cache is purged automatically whenever you update content. Cloudflare retired its Auto Minify feature in 2024, so CSS, JS and HTML minification is now a job for a plugin (see Step 5).
Step 5: Minify CSS, JS and HTML
Minification strips spaces, comments and unnecessary characters from code files, reducing their size by 10-30%. The code works exactly as before; the files are simply smaller. WP Rocket, LiteSpeed Cache and Autoptimize all have built-in minification that you can switch on easily.
As well as minification, turn on combine files (merging many CSS/JS files into one) and defer/async loading for non-critical JavaScript. Be careful here, as combining files sometimes breaks the layout or particular features. Always test after enabling these options and have a rollback ready in case something goes wrong.
Step 6: Lazy load images and videos
Lazy loading holds back images and videos until the user scrolls down to them, which reduces the number of resources loaded when the page first opens. WordPress 5.5 and later include native lazy loading (loading="lazy") for images, so you do not always need an extra plugin (WordPress Core Blog, 2020).
For YouTube and Vimeo videos, use the WP YouTube Lyte plugin or WP Rocket's built-in option. Instead of loading the whole video embed, which adds dozens of HTTP requests, they load only a thumbnail until the user clicks play. A single embedded YouTube video can trigger 20+ extra requests, so the saving is considerable.
Step 7: Remove plugins you do not need
Every active plugin adds load to WordPress. Poorly coded plugins can add database queries, HTTP requests and heavy scripts to every page. There is no fixed “safe” number, but as a rule, fewer plugins means a faster website. What matters most is the quality of each plugin's code rather than the count.
Use the Query Monitor plugin to find out which plugins are slowest. Deactivate and delete any plugin whose job another installed plugin already does. For example, if WP Rocket is active, you do not need a separate caching plugin or a standalone minification plugin. Audit your plugins every 3 months.
Step 8: Use a lightweight theme (Astra or GeneratePress)
A bloated theme is one of the main reasons WordPress runs slowly. Popular multipurpose themes such as Avada or Divi often load dozens of CSS and JS files, even on pages that do not need them. Lightweight themes such as Astra weigh less than 50KB and make fewer than 5 HTTP requests (Astra, 2024).
The best lightweight WordPress themes at the moment:
- Astra: free, fully compatible with Elementor and Gutenberg, with the fastest LCP in its class.
- GeneratePress: very light with clean code, a good fit for blogs and news sites.
- Kadence: free and feature-rich, with performance close to Astra and a more modern interface.
- Blocksy: free and optimised for WordPress Full Site Editing (FSE).
Step 9: Optimise the WordPress database
Over time the WordPress database collects “junk”: unlimited post revisions, expired transients, spam comments and bloated autoload data. An unoptimised database slows down every query that runs against it. WP-Optimize is the best free plugin for cleaning up and optimising WordPress database tables (WordPress.org, 2024).
Practical housekeeping to do regularly: limit post revisions to a maximum of 5 (add define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', 5); to wp-config.php), delete all spam comments, clear expired transients and run OPTIMIZE TABLE through WP-Optimize every month. Schedule automatic clean-ups so you do not forget.
Step 10: Update WordPress, themes and plugins regularly
WordPress updates usually bring performance improvements along with security fixes. WordPress 6.x made significant gains in editor speed and database queries. Running an old version means missing out on performance work that thousands of developers have put in over the years (WordPress.org, 2024).
Websites still running old WordPress versions (5.x and below) miss out on all of those performance improvements. Updating also reduces the risk of security holes being exploited to slow your server down with malware.
Step 11: Turn off WordPress features you do not use
WordPress loads several default features you may not need: WordPress embeds (oEmbed), emoji scripts, XML-RPC and unused REST API endpoints. Each of these adds requests or scripts to every page. Switching off the ones you do not use can save 2-5 HTTP requests per page.
The Perfmatters plugin ($24.95/year) is the easiest way to turn these features off with simple toggles, without touching any code. The free alternative is to add code by hand to your theme's functions.php. At the very least, disable wp-emoji, oEmbed and, if you use a different page builder, the Gutenberg block library.
Step 12: Use the WebP image format
WebP is a modern image format from Google that is 25-34% smaller than JPEG and 26% smaller than PNG at equivalent visual quality (Google Developers, 2023). All modern browsers support WebP, including Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Edge.
There are two ways to use WebP in WordPress. The first is automatic conversion on upload with the ShortPixel or Imagify plugin (both paid). The second is a CDN that automatically serves WebP to browsers that support it, such as Cloudflare with its Polish feature (paid, Pro plan and above). If you want a free option, the WebP Express plugin can convert and serve WebP images locally.
Results after optimisation: realistic expectations
After applying these 12 steps, a realistic outcome is a PageSpeed score increase of 30-50 points. A website starting at 40 can reach 80-90, depending on how complex the theme and content are. Bear in mind that a score of 100 is almost impossible on a real WordPress site with dynamic content (Google Web Dev, 2024).
The best results come from combining all the steps, so do not stop after one or two. Plugins cannot fully make up for slow hosting, and a website with a 2MB hero image will not be fast however well every plugin is configured. Speed optimisation is an ongoing process that you come back to, rather than a one-off job.
Check your score again every 3 months. New versions of plugins, themes and WordPress itself sometimes introduce performance regressions. Make speed audits a routine part of website maintenance, in the same way as security updates.
Is your WordPress website slow?
The Webzoo team can audit your WordPress website and show you what is slowing it down. The first consultation is free.
Book a free consultation on WhatsAppReferences
- Google Web Dev. (2023). Core Web Vitals. https://web.dev/vitals/
- Portent. (2022). Site Speed is (Still) Impacting Your Conversion Rate. https://www.portent.com
- HTTP Archive. (2024). State of Images Report. https://httparchive.org
- Google Developers. (2023). WebP Compression Study. https://developers.google.com/speed/webp
- Cloudflare. (2024). Cloudflare Network Map. https://www.cloudflare.com/network/
- Google Search Central. (2024). Core Web Vitals and Google Search. https://developers.google.com/search/docs
- WordPress Core Blog. (2020). Lazy-loading images in WordPress 5.5. https://make.wordpress.org
- Astra Theme. (2024). Astra Performance Benchmarks. https://wpastra.com/performance//
