Why is your WordPress website so slow?

Your WordPress site loads way too slowly. Pages take seconds to load, visitors drop off and your Google ranking drops. A slow website costs you visitors, conversions and revenue.

Fortunately, a slow WordPress site can almost always be sped up. In this guide you'll discover why your site is slow and how to fix it step by step.

Why speed is so important

One second slower loading costs you:

40% fewer conversions - Visitors leave your site before the page loads. Amazon calculated that 1 second delay costs $1.6 billion per year.

Lower Google ranking - Google uses load time as a ranking factor. Slow sites score lower in search results.

Higher bounce rate - 53% of mobile visitors leave a site that takes longer than 3 seconds to load.

Poor user experience - Visitors remember slow sites and don't come back.

In short: speed is not a luxury, but a necessity. Let's speed up your site.

First test your current speed

Before you start optimizing, measure your current speed:

Google PageSpeed Insights:

1. Go to PageSpeed Insights
2. Enter your URL
3. View your scores for mobile and desktop

GTmetrix:

1. Go to GTmetrix
2. Enter your URL and click "Analyze"
3. View detailed performance metrics

Hostingradar Speed Test:

Use our WordPress speed test to measure your load time and compare with other sites.

Note your current scores. After optimization you test again to see the improvement.

Cause 1: Slow hosting

The biggest bottleneck is often your hosting. Cheap shared hosting shares server resources with hundreds of other sites. If one site gets a lot of traffic, all other sites become slower.

Symptoms of slow hosting:

• TTFB (Time To First Byte) > 600ms
• Server response time > 1 second
• Site slow on all pages, even simple pages

Test your hosting speed:

Use Hostingradar's hosting speed test. This tool specifically measures your server response time.

Solution:

Upgrade to better hosting. These are the speed differences:

• Shared hosting - 2-4 seconds load time (€3-7/month)
• Managed WordPress hosting - 0.5-1.5 seconds (€15-30/month)
• VPS hosting - 0.3-0.8 seconds (€20-50/month)
• Cloud hosting - 0.2-0.5 seconds (€30-100/month)

Check our WordPress hosting comparison for fast providers.

Cause 2: No caching

Without caching, WordPress generates each page anew with each visit. This is unnecessarily slow.

What does caching do?

Caching stores a static HTML version of your page. On the next visit, WordPress serves this HTML directly, without executing PHP and database queries.

Install a cache plugin:

The best free options:

WP Rocket (paid, €49/year):

• Best performance
• Easiest setup
• Page caching, browser caching, GZIP compression
• Database optimization built-in

WP Super Cache (free):

1. Install WP Super Cache
2. Go to Settings > WP Super Cache
3. Select "Caching enabled"
4. Choose "Expert" mode for maximum speed

W3 Total Cache (free, but complex):

• Most advanced options
• Harder to configure
• Best result for technical users

After installation test again. You should see at least 50% speed gain.

Cause 3: Images too large

Large images are the number 1 cause of slow pages. A 3MB photo from your iPhone takes seconds to load.

Compress images:

Use ShortPixel or Imagify:

1. Install the plugin
2. Configure compression (choose "Glossy" for balance between quality and file size)
3. Click "Bulk optimize" to compress all existing images
4. New uploads are automatically compressed

Lazy loading:

Lazy loading only loads images when you scroll to them. WordPress has this built-in by default since version 5.5.

Check if it's active with browser DevTools > Network tab. Images below the fold should only load when scrolling.

Modern formats:

WebP images are 30% smaller than JPEG at equal quality. Use a plugin like WebP Express to automatically serve WebP to modern browsers.

Cause 4: Too many plugins

More plugins means more code to load. Each plugin adds HTTP requests, CSS and JavaScript.

Audit your plugins:

1. Go to Plugins in WordPress
2. Deactivate all plugins
3. Test your speed
4. Activate plugins one by one and test each time

You'll see exactly which plugin slows down your site.

Common slow plugins:

• Social sharing plugins (add 5-10 external scripts)
• Contact form plugins with many features
• Page builders (Elementor, Divi, etc.)
• Related posts plugins
• Slide shows and galleries

Replace with lighter alternatives:

• Social sharing: use lightweight HTML buttons instead of AddThis/ShareThis
• Contact forms: use Contact Form 7 instead of heavier options
• Related posts: build yourself with WP_Query instead of a plugin

Ideal number of plugins:

Keep maximum 10-15 active plugins. More than 20 plugins almost always slows down your site.

Cause 5: Unoptimized database

After months of use your WordPress database fills with junk:

• Post revisions (each edit is saved)
• Spam comments
• Transients (temporary data that has expired)
• Unused tables from old plugins

Optimize your database:

Use WP-Optimize:

1. Install the plugin
2. Go to WP-Optimize > Database
3. Select:
   • Clean post revisions
   • Clean auto-draft posts
   • Clean trashed posts
   • Clean spam/trashed comments
   • Optimize database tables
4. Click "Run all selected optimizations"

Do this monthly for a clean database.

Limit post revisions:

Add this to wp-config.php:

define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', 3);

This saves maximum 3 revisions per post instead of infinite.

Cause 6: External scripts and fonts

Google Fonts, Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel and other external scripts slow down your site. Each external request adds 100-500ms to your load time.

Host Google Fonts locally:

1. Download your fonts from Google Fonts
2. Upload to /wp-content/fonts/
3. Add @font-face CSS to your theme stylesheet
4. This saves 1-2 external requests

Defer JavaScript:

JavaScript blocks the rendering of your page. Defer ensures JS only loads after content.

In WP Rocket or Autoptimize:

• Check "Defer JavaScript"
• Test thoroughly (some scripts break with defer)

Minimize external requests:

Check in DevTools > Network tab which external scripts load:

• Google Analytics can be hosted locally via plugin
• Facebook Pixel is not needed for all pages
• Tracking scripts you better add via Google Tag Manager (1 request instead of 5+)

Cause 7: No CDN

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) serves your site from servers worldwide. Visitors from Japan get your site from a Japanese server instead of your Dutch hosting.

Free CDN options:

Cloudflare (recommended, free):

1. Create account on Cloudflare
2. Add your domain
3. Change your nameservers to Cloudflare's nameservers
4. Cloudflare now serves your static content (images, CSS, JS) worldwide

This can halve your load time for international visitors.

Other CDN options:

• BunnyCDN (€1/month, super fast)
• StackPath (paid)
• KeyCDN (paid, pay-as-you-go)

Cause 8: No GZIP compression

GZIP compresses your HTML, CSS and JavaScript for 70% smaller files.

Test if GZIP is active:

Go to Check GZIP Compression. If GZIP is not active, enable it:

Via plugin (easiest):

WP Rocket and WP Super Cache have GZIP built-in. Check the option.

Via .htaccess:

Add this to your .htaccess file:

<IfModule mod_deflate.c>
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml text/css text/javascript application/javascript application/x-javascript
</IfModule>

Cause 9: HTTP/2 not active

HTTP/2 loads multiple files in parallel instead of one by one. This saves seconds on pages with many resources.

Check HTTP/2:

Go to HTTP/2 Test. If your site uses HTTP/1.1, upgrade.

How to activate:

HTTP/2 requires HTTPS and server support:

1. Install an SSL certificate (free via Let's Encrypt)
2. Contact your hosting if HTTP/2 doesn't automatically activate
3. Most modern WordPress hosts support HTTP/2 by default

Cause 10: PHP version too old

Newer PHP versions are 2-3x faster than old versions.

Check your PHP version:

Go in WordPress to Tools > Site Health > Info > Server. Look at "PHP version".

Speed differences:

• PHP 5.6 - baseline (stop! this version is unsafe)
• PHP 7.0 - 2x faster
• PHP 7.4 - 3x faster
• PHP 8.0 - 3.5x faster
• PHP 8.1/8.2 - 4x faster

Upgrade PHP:

Go to your hosting control panel > Select PHP version. Choose PHP 8.1 or 8.2.

Note: test first on a staging environment. Some old plugins don't work with new PHP versions.

Extra optimizations

For maximum speed:

Minify CSS and JavaScript - Remove whitespace from code (WP Rocket does this automatically).

Combine CSS/JS files - Merge multiple files into 1 file (fewer HTTP requests).

DNS prefetch - Add to :

<link rel="dns-prefetch" href="//fonts.googleapis.com">

Preload critical resources - Load important fonts and CSS first:

<link rel="preload" href="/fonts/my-font.woff2" as="font" crossorigin>

Remove query strings - Query strings (?ver=1.2.3) prevent caching. Remove them with a plugin or via functions.php.

Disable pingbacks/trackbacks - Go to Settings > Discussion and uncheck.

Step-by-step plan: from 0 to fast

Follow this order for maximum result:

1. Measure your current speed (PageSpeed Insights)
2. Upgrade to faster hosting if your TTFB > 600ms
3. Install WP Rocket or WP Super Cache
4. Compress all images with ShortPixel
5. Remove unused plugins
6. Optimize database with WP-Optimize
7. Activate Cloudflare CDN (free)
8. Upgrade to PHP 8.1 or higher
9. Enable GZIP and HTTP/2
10. Measure again and celebrate your speed gain

These steps give most sites 50-70% speed improvement.

Target scores

Aim for these scores:

Google PageSpeed Insights:

• Mobile: > 85
• Desktop: > 90

GTmetrix:

• Performance: A grade
• Structure: A grade
• Fully loaded time: < 2 seconds

Core Web Vitals:

• LCP (Largest Contentful Paint): < 2.5 seconds
• FID (First Input Delay): < 100ms
• CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift): < 0.1

These are realistic goals for a well-optimized WordPress site.

A slow WordPress site is frustrating, but with these steps you'll make your site blazing fast. Start with the biggest bottlenecks (hosting, caching, images) and work from there.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is WordPress free?

WordPress itself is free open-source software. You only pay for hosting, a domain name, and any premium themes or plugins you want to use.

How difficult is WordPress to learn?

WordPress is relatively easy to learn. You can master the basic functions within a few hours. Advanced customizations require more time.

Can I move WordPress to a different host later?

Yes, WordPress websites can be moved to a different hosting provider. Most providers offer free assistance for this.