Why your WordPress site is slow, and how to fix it

One: the images

This is the cause about seven times out of ten, and it’s the easiest to fix. Someone uploaded a photo straight from a phone: four thousand pixels wide and three megabytes. WordPress then showed it in a box eight hundred pixels wide. The browser still downloads all three megabytes.

Nothing on a website needs to be wider than about 1800 pixels. Resize before you upload, save as WebP, and keep photos under 200 kilobytes each. Use PNG only when you really need a see-through background, like a logo. Done properly, this one step often cuts load time in half.

Two: too many plugins doing too little

Every active plugin can load its own styles and its own code on every page of your site, whether that page uses it or not. A contact form plugin loading on a blog post is pure waste, repeated on every visit.

Go through the plugin list and be honest about each one. Turn off anything you can’t explain. Delete anything already turned off. Be suspicious of any plugin whose whole job could be three lines of code. Twenty plugins is a warning sign. Forty is a diagnosis.

Three: a theme built to look good in a demo

Many popular themes are sold on a demo full of sliders, animated counters, parallax scrolling and three carousels. All of that ships as code, and it loads on your site even when you use none of it.

Light themes exist and they aren’t worse. We build on Astra with Elementor because the starting weight is small, and the parts you don’t use mostly don’t load. Both of those, and everything else we run client sites on, are listed with our reasoning on the tools we use. If you’re stuck with a heavy theme, at least switch off the features you aren’t using in its settings.

Four: caching, or the lack of it

Without caching, WordPress rebuilds your page from the database on every single visit. Caching saves the finished page and serves that instead. It’s far faster and it costs nothing.

Install one caching plugin. One. Two of them fight each other and cause stranger problems than having none. Turn on page caching first, test the site, then turn on minification, then test again. One change at a time, so that when something breaks you know what broke it.

Five: hosting you are underpaying for

This is the one you can’t fix in an afternoon. Very cheap shared hosting puts your site on a server with hundreds of others. When one of them has a busy morning, your site is the one that feels slow.

You don’t need expensive managed hosting for a small business site. You do need to be honest about what you’re paying for. If you’ve done the other four things and the server still takes over a second to answer before it sends anything, the hosting is the problem. The host we actually put client sites on, and why, is on the tools we use.

Measure it before and after

Fixes only count if you can show they worked. Test the same three pages before you change anything and again afterwards, using the same tool each time.

The first three are Google’s Core Web Vitals, and the thresholds are the ones Google publishes. Page weight matters more here than in markets with cheap data, because every megabyte costs your visitor money.

How to know whether any of it worked

Test before, change one thing, test after. Use PageSpeed Insights and look at the mobile score, not the desktop one. Mobile is where your visitors are, and it’s where the score is honest.

The number that matters most is Largest Contentful Paint. That’s roughly how long it takes before the visitor sees the main thing on the page. Under 2.5 seconds is the target. Under two is better, and it’s entirely doable on WordPress.

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