Making WordPress faster – step by step.

Why speed matters

Visitors do not wait. Every extra second of load time increases the share of those who leave before they have seen anything – especially on a phone with weak reception.

Google measures this too and rates pages among other things by the Core Web Vitals: how fast the main content appears (LCP), how fast the page reacts to input (INP) and whether anything shifts while loading (CLS). A fast site is not only more pleasant, it is also found more easily.

Measure first, then change

Before you rebuild anything, you need a starting figure. Free and meaningful is Google's PageSpeed Insights: enter the address and look at the values for mobile – they are almost always worse and the ones Google goes by.

• Measure several times and not only the home page. A sub-page with large images or a form often behaves very differently.
• Watch the server response time (time to first byte). If it is high, the cause is the server or a plugin doing a lot of work on every request – then no image optimiser will help.
• Change one thing at a time and measure again. Otherwise you will not know what helped.

The foundation: hosting

The best plugin will not make an overloaded server fast. Three things decide:

• Current PHP. PHP 8 runs WordPress considerably faster than the old PHP 7. Many sites still run on an outdated version out of convenience.
• Enough memory and run time. Page builders and shops need more than the tight defaults of some providers; when it gets tight, requests abort or crawl.
• Short distances. If server and visitors are in the same country, every request arrives faster.

With us, websites run on NVMe SSDs in Germany, with up to 1,024 MB PHP memory per request, and you set the PHP version per domain yourself in the customer center.

Images: the most common brake

A photo straight from the camera easily weighs 5 MB – and is shown in a tile 600 pixels wide. Images like that make most slow sites slow.

• Resize before uploading. A website rarely needs more than 2000 pixels width.
• Use modern formats. WordPress supports WebP; files are considerably smaller than JPEG at the same quality.
• Lazy loading only loads images when they scroll into view. WordPress does this by itself – except for the first large image at the top, which should come immediately.

Caching: stop rebuilding every page

Without a cache, WordPress assembles every page from the database on every request. A caching plugin stores the finished result and serves it directly – often the biggest single gain.

Important: one caching plugin, not three. Several on top of each other get in each other's way and produce exactly the errors you then spend hours looking for. Clear the cache after larger changes, otherwise visitors still see the old version.

With us, the one-click installation sets up the page cache for you on request, and in the customer center you clear it or switch it on and off – without logging in to WordPress. For shops we deliberately leave it out: a page cache that does not know about the basket would otherwise show visitors other people's baskets.

Clear out plugins and themes

It is not the number of plugins that slows things down, but individual heavy ones. A slider on every page, three statistics plugins, a page builder loading hundreds of kilobytes of scripts for every page – it adds up.

• Deactivate one plugin after another as a test and measure. The one that slows things down stands out quickly.
• The free plugin Query Monitor shows which plugin produces how many database queries.
• What you no longer need, delete – deactivated, it still sits on the server and still needs updates.

Tidy up the database

Over the years quite a bit accumulates: hundreds of revisions of every post, remains of deleted plugins, expired temporary data. A clean-up plugin removes it in a few clicks. Make a backup first – what is deleted from a database only comes back from the backup.