WordPress speed optimization, easy 5 steps guide.
Published: 11 April 2025
A slow WordPress website can frustrate visitors, harm your search engine rankings, and reduce conversions.
Fortunately, optimizing your wordpress website’s speed doesn’t require advanced technical skills.
In this guide, you’ll learn actionable tactics to optimize your WordPress website speed, from image optimization to selecting the right hosting provider.
Why Page Speed Matters ?
1. User Experience
Visitors expect websites to load quickly.
Studies show that 53% of users abandon a site if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load.
Faster sites keep visitors engaged, reduce bounce rates, and improve overall satisfaction.
2. SEO Rankings
Google prioritizes page speed in its ranking algorithm.
Metrics like Core Web Vitals (e.g., Largest Contentful Paint, First Input Delay) directly impact your visibility in search results.
A faster site can outrank competitors.
3. Conversions and Revenue
Speed impacts your bottom line.
For example, Walmart reported a 2% increase in conversions for every 1-second improvement in load time.
Whether you’re selling products or collecting leads, a faster site drives results.
Step 1: Optimize Images for Faster Loading
Images often account for the largest portion of a webpage’s size. Here’s how to optimize them:
1. Compress Images
Use tools like the YZ image compressor to reduce file sizes without sacrificing quality.
The tool automatically compresses images upon upload.
And if you have 100s of uncompressed images you might want to consider a plugin like smush or optimoly which will save you a lot of time.
2. Use Modern Formats
Convert images to WebP, a format that’s 30% smaller than JPEG or PNG.
WordPress supports WebP natively (version 5.8+), you can quickly convert your images to WEBP using my Image conversion tool.
I created this tool myself specifically for that bec. other tools bothers me with their limits, so you can convert unlimited images but only 3 images at a time. Give it a try, it’s free.
3. Enable Lazy Loading
Lazy loading delays the loading of offscreen images until a user scrolls to them. Enable this feature via WordPress settings or plugins like Litespeed cache plugin.
Step 2: Leverage Litespeed Cache Plugin
Caching creates static copies of your site, reducing server load and speeding up page delivery. LiteSpeed Cache is a top choice for WordPress users.
Why LiteSpeed Cache?
- Server-Level Caching: Integrates directly with LiteSpeed servers for maximum efficiency.
- CSS/JS Optimization: Combines and minifies code to reduce HTTP requests.
- Browser Caching: Stores resources locally on visitors’ devices.
- 100% Free: so you can use all its features without limits or annoying notifications to upgrade.
How to Set It Up
1. Install LiteSpeed Cache from the WordPress plugin directory.
2. By default the plugin works without any settings setup but you probably want to edit/adjust some of the settings.
3. If you don’t want to get into technical stuff The easiest way is to use one of their presets.
4. After applying one of the presets, make sure your website looks and functions correctly. On both desktop and mobile.
I recommend the Basic presset, bec you probably won’t run into any issues with it, but if it’s okay with you go with the advanced preset.
The CSS & JS Optimization can cause some problems for different reasons depending on your theme, whether you are using a page builder or not, and type of the website, static, like blogs, or dynamic with user interactions, custom page templates and different API calls.
If your website is mostly static and not dynamic you probably won’t face many issues.
However, it’s important to always test on a staging website before you apply to your live one especially if you are getting consistent traffic to your website.
Pro Tip: Only use one caching plugin at a time to Avoid Conflicts:
Step 3: Choose a Performance-Focused Hosting Provider
Your hosting provider is the foundation of your site’s speed. Hostinger stands out for its affordability and speed-focused features:
Key Benefits of Hostinger:
- LiteSpeed Servers: Faster than traditional Apache servers.
- NVMe Storage: Delivers data 5x faster than standard SSDs.
- Free CDN: Distributes content globally for reduced latency (comes with business plan or higher).
- Managed WordPress: Includes automatic updates, daily backups, and staging environments.
Hostinger Plan Recommendations
Premium Web Hosting: If you are starting out, or your website get less than 30K monthly visitors this plan would be enough.
Business Web Hosting: To actually get all the benefits Hostinger offer this is the plan to start with. and its the plan I use for myself and my clients.
* If you buy one their hosting plan through these links you will get an extra 20% Discount , just make sure the promo code is added when you are checking out.
Other popular and well tested options are, blue host, site ground, dream host, and Kinsta.
What to look for in a hosting provider to ensure high speed website performance ?
1. Data Centers: Choose a hosting provider with servers located close to your target audience. For example, if most of your visitors are in the US, hosting your website on servers in Europe can lead to slower load times. The closer the server is to your audience, the faster your website will perform.
2. NVMe vs SSD storage: in short NVEe is faster in transferring data, and you will usually find it offered in higher hosting plans.
3. LiteSpeed Web Server / NGINX: which is faster than Apache servers.
Built-in Server Caching Features:
4. Resource Allocation: RAM, CPU cores, I/O limits, Inodes (file count limits).
These are almost the most important things you want to look at when choosing a hosting provider.
Also keep in mind that shared hosting plans are usually slower than cloud, VPS, or Dedicated plans.
However , if your website is getting around 10K or less visitors per month you don’t need to worry about much about whether it’s a shared plan or not.
Step 4: Audit and Minimize Plugins
Too many plugins can bloat your site, increasing load times and security risks.
How to Minimize Plugins on your WordPress Website ?
1. Delete Unused Plugins: Even inactive plugins can slow your site.
2. Replace Heavy Plugins: some plugins are heavier than others, and some plugins are well known for slowing a website load time.
So check if that plugin you are about to install will have a negative impact on your website or not by simply searching it, or even better, use wphive to check plugins you want and also find better alternatives.
3. Use WPCode Plugin: This one plugin helped me replace a lot of other plugins.
It allows you to add code to your website without editing files or anything, and there are even premade code snippets you can add to your website with one click, without writing one line of code.
This will allow you to replace plugins that are meant for some easy, or just one task. check their library to see what you can achieve with it.
Pro Tip
keep your total plugins as low as possible. Not only will it make your website faster but also more secure, and will face way less issues with plugins compatibility.
Step 5: Test Your Website Speed Regularly
Track improvements with these free tools:
- Scores your site (0–100) and provides actionable recommendations.
- Focus on fixing “Opportunities” like unused CSS or large images. And user experience with the metrics like the INP (interaction to next paint)
2. GTmetrix
- Analyzes load times and provides a waterfall chart to pinpoint bottlenecks.
- Key metrics: Time to First Byte (TTFB) and Largest Contentful Paint (LCP).
Advanced WordPress Speed Optimization Tactics
If you already applied the above optimization tactics you should do good, and if you want to go further check this more advanced tactics for website speed optimization.
1. Enable a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
A CDN stores cached copies of your site on servers worldwide. Free options like Cloudflare integrate seamlessly with WordPress.
And many hosting providers offer a free CDN in their plans.
2. Optimize Your Database
Using the Litespeed cache plugin, you can also clean spam comments, post revisions, and transient options. Schedule automatic cleanups for maintenance-free speed.
3. Minimize Redirects
Excessive redirects create additional HTTP requests.
But before you install a separate plugin to manage redirects check if one of your plugins can handle it.
Rank math SEO for example (If you are using it) already has such an option. So you minimize the plugins you use.
If not, you can check for a redirection plugin to fix broken links and streamline navigation.
4. Minimize page/elements transition effects.
While you can have animations and effects without slowing page load time, it require some technical skills, for example using CSS instead of JS, and optimizing this code right.
Yet, A lot of page/element effects at once can slow down your page load time, especially on mobile, and if the effect is delayed for a second or 2 it already loses its aesthetic.
Improving your WordPress site’s speed is an ongoing process. Start with one step, like compressing images or installing LiteSpeed Cache, and gradually implement other fixes and dive into technical stuff when you are done with the easy stuff.