6 simple ways to make a WordPress site load faster

These days patience is getting shorter and shorter, especially when it comes to website loading times. Websites that take more than 3 seconds to load are a conversion killer, impact your SEO rankings, and send visitors packing before your content has loaded.

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It’s easy to see why WordPress is one of the most popular website platforms around. The huge number of plugins and themes available mean that there is very little, if anything, that you can’t do with a WordPress website. But, with great power comes great responsibility. Just because you can have all the bells and whistles doesn’t mean you should, because they often lead to a slow loading website.

When people ask me how to make a WordPress site load faster there are five main areas I look at:

Checking your loading speeds
Optimising your images
Streamlining your plugins
Caching and minification
Database optimisation

Let’s walk through each, with links to detailed guides so you can dig in further.

Estimated reading time: 8 minutes

Check Your Current Speed

You can’t make your WordPress site load faster if you don’t know the extent of the problem. Just how slow is your website, and what are the problem areas?

There are 3 main tools when it comes to testing website loading speeds:

Google PageSpeed Insights
Gives you separate scores for desktop and mobile. It’s a great place to start, but can be inconsistent.
GTMetrix
This is my go-to for reliable, detailed results. The Waterfall tab shows exactly what’s loading, when, and how long it’s taking.
Pingdom
Presents results in a user-friendly way with an overall performance grade, but sometimes the headline score can be misleading.

See my Website Speed Test guide for step-by-step instructions on how to use each tool.

Optimise your images

9 times out of 10 images are the biggest cause of slow loading WordPress sites.

When a browser loads a web page for the first time, it will download (among other things) each image on the page. If the page has loads of images and/or the image files on the page a very big this can really slow down a website and eat into mobile data.

Quick tips from my workflow:

Resize before you upload – An image intended to span the width of the page doesn’t need to be bigger than 2000px wide.
Save JPEG for photos, PNG for graphics with transparency, WebP for the best balance of quality and file size.
Compress before upload using CompressJPEG, WP Smush, or ShortPixel.
Lazy load so images at the bottom of the page don’t stop images higher up the page from loading.

I even keep Canva templates for blog featured images so I can resize quickly and consistently.

Full details in my WordPress Image Optimisation guide.

Streamline your plugins

Plugins are the jewels in the WordPress crown. They’re what make WordPress so flexible and they can do almost anything.

But shiny object syndrome is real. Install ALL the plugins, and you’ll get a slow loading site. Not all plugins are created equal; some are much heavier than others.

Do a plugin audit:

List every plugin (delete inactive ones).
Ask: is it essential, or just nice to have?
Be picky with the nice-to-haves to make sure they truly add value.

But some people think I’m a bit harsh when it comes to plugins but if you want to make your WordPress site load faster, you need to be ruthless.

Caching and minification

It sounds really scary but in a nutshell, caching is where a website allows a browser to download copies of the files it needs. So next time it doesn’t have to download them all again. That means faster load times for repeat visitors and less data usage for mobile users.

Minification strips unnecessary characters (spaces, line breaks) from code, making files smaller and faster to load. Some hosts (like my recommendation Lyrical Host) include caching and minification in their infrastructure. If yours doesn’t, plugins like WP-Optimize, WP Rocket and Swift Performance work well.

Upgrade your hosting

Your hosting is where the files for your website live. But not all hosts are created equal. The better the quality of the equipment used to host your website, the quicker your site will load.

That GoDaddy hosting you got at a steal? Probably not going to cut it if you want a fast website.

My recommendation: Lyrical Host – great kit, excellent support, and I use them myself.
Use code KIMSCOTLAND10 for 10% off your first month. (Yes, it’s an affiliate link, but I only recommend what I use and love.)

Database optimisation

WordPress can be wasteful with what it stores in its database, autosaves, post revisions, deleted content, leftover plugin data. A bloated database slows things down.

I use WP-Optimize to:

Delete post revisions and autosaves.
Permanently remove trashed content.
Optimise database tables.

Important: Always back up your site first – either via your host or a plugin like UpdraftPlus.

How to make a WordPress site load faster – summary

My top 6 tips on how to make a WordPress site load faster are:

Run a speed test before making changes
Resize and compress your images before uploading
Audit plugins and remove anything non-essential
Add caching and minification
Optimise your database (do not do this without taking a backup first)
Invest in good hosting