This guide is your master plan on how to make a WordPress website load faster. This isn’t a list of generic tips you’ve heard before. It shows you the most impactful areas to tackle and points you to my detailed tutorials so you can dig into each one.
A slow site can drop you down Google search rankings, frustrate visitors, and cost you sales. But the good news? You don’t have to (and probably shouldn’t) do everything at once – start with one area, see the results, and take it from there.
This guide is currently a work in progress with plans to add sections on caching & minification, database optimisation and maintaining your fast website speeds moving forward.
1. Check your website speed
Before you learn how to make a WordPress website load faster, you need to find out how your site is performing now, otherwise you won’t know what to improve. A proper speed test will not only show you how slow the site is loading but it will highlight the problem areas too.
There are three main free tools for this:
- Google PageSpeed Insights – Measures speed on desktop and mobile with tailored suggestions for improvement.
- GTMetrix – My go-to for detailed, reliable results. I like the ‘Waterfall’ view which shows you exactly what’s been loaded and in what order.
- Pingdom – Gives you an overall performance grade in a simple, visual way. A great one to dip your toe in with.
Speed tests can seem overwhelming and very technical to start with, but it’s worth getting to know them. The insights you’ll get will show you where to make changes for the biggest impact rather than guessing.
See my Website Speed Test guide for how to use each tool and what the results mean.
2. Optimise your images
99% of the time, when a website is running slow it’s because of images. Bigger image file sizes make your web pages ‘heavier’ which means they take longer to load especially for visitors using their phones. Big images also mean more mobile data gets used too.
Optimising images isn’t about reducing the quality so much that your pictures become blurry. It’s about being more efficient, using images that are the exact size you need, using the best format and compressing them to get rid of any unneeded data.
And you walk away with a site that loads faster, more room in your hosting storage and encourages visitors to stay longer, which piques the interests of search engines too.
My WordPress Image Optimisation guide walks you through exactly how to do this, including the best tools and formats.
3. Apply quick wins
Once you’ve checked your speed and optimised your images, you can move on to other improvements like:
- Using caching & minification
- Getting rid of any unnecessary plugins
- Optimising your database
They sound complicated but actually they can be done with a few clicks of a button.
I’ve covered all of these in detail in my Make a WordPress site Load Faster guide.
4. Upgrade your hosting
A post on how to make a WordPress website load faster would not be complete without mentioning hosting.
Even with all the right optimisations in place, your site will still crawl if it’s on an overcrowded server running on out of date equipment. Good hosting is the foundation of a fast website.
I use and recommend Lyrical Host (affiliate link*) for its speed, reliability, and excellent support, plus it comes with built-in caching and security features that give you a head start. Their infrastructure is intended to host lightning quick websites.
Read my full Lyrical Host Review to see why I recommend them and how they compare to other providers.
How to make a WordPress website load faster – wrap up
Learning how to make a WordPress website load faster is about ticking every box in an afternoon. It’s about finding the biggest opportunities, making changes and testing again. Over time, small changes will add up to create a noticeably quicker website, resulting in a much smoother experience for your visitors.
Use the guides linked here as your action plan and if you’d rather not DIY it, I can handle the speed boost for you.