How to speed up a WordPress site

Start by measuring

Before changing anything, find out where you stand. Google PageSpeed Insights is free: enter your page address and it reports how the page performs on mobile and desktop, with suggestions for what to fix. Test your home page and one or two of your most important pages, such as a services page or a product page, and save the results so you can compare after making changes.

Do not chase a perfect score. Treat the report as a list of clues, and focus on the changes that make the biggest difference to real visitors.

1. Begin with good hosting

Hosting is the foundation. If the server is slow to respond, nothing else you do will fully make up for it. Hosting set up for WordPress, with sensible server settings and caching, gives every page a head start. If you are comparing hosts, see what to look for in WordPress hosting.

2. Use caching

Without caching, WordPress builds each page from scratch for every visitor, running code and querying the database each time. Caching saves a ready-made copy of the page and serves that instead, which is much quicker. Caching can happen at server level, through a plugin, or both. Use one caching approach rather than stacking several caching plugins, which can conflict.

3. Compress and resize your images

Images are often the heaviest part of a page. Common problems are photos uploaded straight from a phone or camera, far larger than they will ever be displayed.

• Resize images to roughly the size they appear on the page before uploading.
• Compress them, either before uploading or with an image optimisation plugin.
• Use modern formats like WebP, which usually give smaller files at similar quality.

4. Turn on lazy loading

Lazy loading means images and videos further down the page only load when a visitor scrolls towards them. The top of the page appears sooner, and people who never scroll down never download those files. WordPress lazy loads many images by default, and Elementor and optimisation plugins offer further options.

5. Cut down heavy plugins

Every plugin can add code, styles and scripts to your pages. Some are light, others load large files on every page even where they are not needed.

1. List your plugins and ask whether each one is still needed.
2. Remove the ones you no longer use.
3. Look for overlap, such as two plugins doing similar jobs.
4. Test your speed again after each round of changes.

Fewer plugins also means fewer updates and less to secure, as our guide to keeping your WordPress site secure explains.

6. Keep Elementor pages lean

Elementor makes it easy to build attractive pages, and just as easy to overbuild them. To keep pages light:

• Avoid deeply nested sections and columns where a simpler layout would do.
• Use animations, sliders and background videos sparingly.
• Stick to a small number of fonts and font weights.
• Reuse saved sections and global styles rather than restyling every element.
• Check Elementor's own performance settings, which can reduce what is loaded.

7. Consider a CDN

A content delivery network, or CDN, stores copies of your images, styles and scripts on servers in many locations and serves them from one near each visitor. It helps most when your visitors are spread across different countries, and it also takes load off your main server.

Make it a habit

Speed is not a one-off job. New plugins, large images and extra page sections creep in over time. Run PageSpeed Insights every few months and after any big change, so you catch problems early.

Fast Elementor hosting from WP Web Hosting

WP Web Hosting is set up for WordPress and Elementor from the start, with free Elementor pre-installed on every plan. WP Start costs £14.95 a month for one site, and WP Managed at £29.95 a month adds updates done for you and uptime monitoring. Billing is monthly and you can cancel any month. Find out more about our Elementor hosting.

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