WordPress Slow? Here’s How to Fix Your Slow Loading WordPress Website

0:00Why We Made a Video on Fixing Slow WordPress

This video is about how to fix slow WordPress. I'm surprised we haven't done a video on this yet. Brendan here from wpspeedfix.com. This is the original blog post we wrote more than 10 years ago, sometime in 2013, 2014, about how to fix slow WordPress, before we even had WP Speed Fix. This post has been seen by millions of people now, people with WordPress speed problems, WordPress running slowly. I'm really surprised we don't have a specific video for it, but here we are.

We wrote this post 10, 15 years ago when we did web design and we had a lot of customers whose site was just slow and they didn't know what to do. So we wrote this post about how to fix it a long time before a lot of people knew how to fix WordPress speed issues. Anyway, let's talk through this post about fixing your slow site.

Let's kick off with where the site is actually slow. What does slow mean? Slow means different things to different people. At WP Speed Fix, we get a lot of inquiries about site speed, with people saying the site is slow, and it's not actually slow, it's quite fast. So let's get specific. Where is the site slow? Is it that logged-in users are slow? Is it the admin panel, the back end, that's slow? Are you testing the site in a tool like Google PageSpeed Insights and it says it's slow? Is there somewhere else that it's slow? Let's get specific first.

If it's something to do with logged-in users, so if you have a WooCommerce site, for example, where customers are logging in, or a membership site where customers are logging in, we have a specific video about that. I'll link you up to it. It's a specific video about speeding up sites for logged-in users in particular, because there's a particular set of things to do there. Same with the back end. There are particular videos on backend speed, which is different to the front end.

1:55The Core Web Vitals Metrics Explained

If it's Google PageSpeed Insights or some other test, or something on the front end of the site, we would recommend that you always start with Google's Core Web Vitals data, or Core Web Vitals report. Not PageSpeed Insights, not GTmetrix, not something like that. Start with Core Web Vitals data. Core Web Vitals data is a set of standardized speed metrics where Google grabs speed data from every page load on your website, from Google Chrome-based browsers hitting the site, and collects that into a database. So it is a collection of how users are experiencing speed on your website.

There are three Core Web Vitals metrics. LCP, Largest Contentful Paint, is the speed metric. That is a measure of how fast the site is to load, or how fast the largest piece of content on a page is to load. That's when the visitor basically perceives the page as having loaded. There is CLS, Cumulative Layout Shift. That's not speed. That's how much the page moves around while it's loading. You would have experienced this, where you're on a website, it's still loading, you go to click on something, it finishes loading and now you're clicking in the wrong spot. That's layout shift, and that needs to be under 0.1. That is not a time or a speed. That is a computed number from the amount of stuff that moves around.

Then there's INP, Interaction to Next Paint. That is how responsive the website is. How quickly do I get a response when I do something, when I hit a submit button or subscribe to something or click on something? How fast does the website give me some response back? That needs to be under 200 milliseconds. A high INP means the website's going to feel slow to my inputs. So it's different to load time. It is a speed, but it's input related or interaction related. Those are the three Core Web Vitals metrics.

There are other web vitals metrics, not the core ones. Two important ones there are Time to First Byte, which is how quickly the server sends stuff back after I request it, and FCP, so similar to LCP. FCP means First Contentful Paint. That's when the site starts to load, or as a visitor, that's when I perceive it as starting to load. They're not the core Core Web Vitals metrics, but they are important as well, and we talk about that in a second. If it is front-end speed, that is the front of the site for logged-out users, that you're looking at, continue with this video. If it's not, go and look at one of those other videos.

4:20Reading the Free Core Web Vitals Report

Let's talk about Core Web Vitals metrics. There are a few different ways to get them. There is a report on our website. If you go to WP Speed Fix, under here, free Core Web Vitals report, there's no opt-in required. It takes 5 or 10 seconds to run and you get a report like this. It has the three Core Web Vitals metrics, those two additional metrics, Time to First Byte and FCP, and then it has the historical speed over the last 6-ish months. This is publicly available data. You don't need to opt in, you don't need to do anything, it's all available there. You can run it on competitor sites, too, so you can see how the speed is going over time.

This site has a problem. In terms of how Google categorizes the speed or the Core Web Vitals metrics, there's good, or green, yellow or orange, needs improvement, and then there's red, which is poor or bad. For LCP the metric is 2.5 seconds. Under 2.5 seconds is a good load time, or good LCP time, and Google wants to see 75% or more of your visitors under a 2.5 second load time. You can see here that for this site only 57% of visitors got a good load time. That is a problem. About 40% of visitors got a less than optimal speed experience and 20% got a poor speed experience, so the site took over 4 seconds to load. That's not good at all.

These metrics are good. INP is good, that's 130 milliseconds there, and 91% of users are getting a good INP time. No CLS, so no layout shift, which is good. There's a tiny little bit, 2%, but that's fine, that's not a big deal. Time to First Byte is horrible. Usually when you see 50/50 like this, there is a technical problem that needs fixing. If it were just optimization, we would expect it to look like this, where you've got green, orange and some red. But when we see 50/50 like this, there is a particular problem. In this case, for this site, I suspect the caching is not working for some types of pages, and that's probably either search pages or filter pages.

We've talked about this in other videos. We have specific videos on FCP, LCP and Time to First Byte. One of the things you need to do is diagnose the root cause of speed issues. On this one we see the LCP is poor, and that's not good. But we look at this and the Time to First Byte graph is near identical. If we look at these peaks and troughs, they're the same. What this means is, if we're trying to fix this LCP metric, we actually need to fix this Time to First Byte first. That's how quickly the server is responding to inputs. If that's slow, everything else will be slow, so keep that in mind.

7:04Why PageSpeed Scores Mislead and Diagnosis Comes First

The reason I'm showing you this is that so many people are fixated on Google PageSpeed Insights. They see they have a 50 or 60 score on mobile on Google PageSpeed Insights and they think their site is slow. Don't worry about those scores. Don't worry about the speed test tools. The number one thing to focus on is Core Web Vitals data. That is the real-world speed that real visitors are getting when they're on your website. There's a difference between GTmetrix, PageSpeed Insights and the Core Web Vitals data. GTmetrix, PageSpeed Insights and other speed test tools are called lab data, or they're test tools. They're called synthetic testing. They're trying to approximate reality, or a real user. Core Web Vitals data is real-world data. It's real user metrics, so it is the actual speed of the site, and that's what's important.

There are a lot of companies out there that will guarantee you a 100 score in PageSpeed Insights, but they do that by breaking the website, effectively. They do things like not loading the full website until the user interacts with it. That makes the site look great in a PageSpeed Insights test, you'll get 100. But the problem is it doesn't fix the speed in the real world. It actually can make it worse in some cases. It will also break your SEO in a lot of cases, because when a Google crawler comes along, or an AI crawler, they're not seeing the full website, they're seeing a half-loaded website that's missing a whole bunch of stuff. So be very careful if you focus on PageSpeed score. You need to focus on Core Web Vitals. It is totally different. It's a different data set. It is real-world data. Generally it's based on a 28-day average. When you run Google PageSpeed Insights, there is a section at the top that has the data, and that is an average of the last 28 days. So be careful, that data is not going to change very quickly. Just keep that in mind.

It's important, before you make any changes, before going and doing a bunch of stuff on the website, that you diagnose what you're actually fixing and get to the root cause of the problem. A lot of people we see are changing plugins and themes and all sorts of stuff, stabbing in the dark effectively, and trying to fix stuff without actually doing any diagnosis first. So a lot of the things they do are ineffective. We often have customers come to us at WP Speed Fix who've been through three developers or five developers and none of them can fix it. They just keep installing different plugins, changing the caching plugin, whatever, because they haven't really diagnosed what the problem is. They haven't looked at the metrics and seen where the problems lie. With this particular site, it doesn't matter what caching plugins we use. None of that matters until we fix this Time to First Byte. That is the root cause of the speed issues on this particular website.

If you want to get technical, there is another report that is similar to this. I'll just grab this web address. That's CrUX Vis. It's based on the same data set, but it's a much more technical report, so if you're a technical person this may be a better tool for you. Let's just try that again. There we go. It's the same data, but much more technical. You can see it's capturing data week to week. It has the metrics here, and it can dig down into things like the subparts of LCP, the LCP load time, and what component of the other metrics cause that LCP time. This is very technical. We can see here that the LCP time is comprised of 3.6 seconds of Time to First Byte. I won't get into that too much, because we're getting into technical stuff that's beside the point here.

My point is that PageSpeed Insights and other test tools like GTmetrix can be very misleading. Don't optimize for those. Optimize for Core Web Vitals and diagnose the problem before making changes. Changes in the theme or changing plugins does nothing if the problem lies elsewhere. You're just wasting time. With that in mind, I expect you to run some tools, some reports, and figure out what the root cause of the problem is before making changes. Also just a caveat there: Core Web Vitals won't have any data set unless you have 50 to 100 visits a day on average on the site. It's not an exact number, because they need to be Chrome-based browsers. Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, they're all based on Chrome. Unless they're Chrome-based browsers, they won't capture that data. So it's a rough number of 50 to 100 visits a day. If you're below that threshold, then tools like Google PageSpeed Insights or whatever are the next best thing. But you want to be looking at Core Web Vitals data primarily.

11:16Good Hosting Is the Foundation

Now let's talk about the basics. You need good hosting. The two hosts we recommend are Cloudways or WP Alpha. WP Alpha is our hosting product. Cloudways is much more technical. If you are a technical person, then Cloudways would be the way to go. If you're a small business, WP Alpha might be a better fit for you. Basically, hosting is the foundation, the fundamental part of the website. If the hosting is crap, if it's slow, everything else is going to be slow.

What's good hosting versus bad hosting? Well, if you're paying less than the cost of a cup of coffee for hosting, it's probably not great. If you're paying two bucks or five bucks a month, it's probably not good hosting. Let's be honest, you cannot expect to run a commercial business on something you're paying $2 a month for. That just makes no sense. Cheap hosts are a bit like low-cost airlines. They do the basics, but in order to get that $2 or $5 a month price point, they're going to sting you elsewhere. Everything's an upgrade. Everything you have to pay for. There are a lot of limits. It's exactly like going on a low-cost airline. It is the absolute bare minimum. It'll get you there, but that's probably not ideal if you're running a business on top of it. So just keep that in mind.

So, Cloudways, cways.net, or WP Alpha. Those would be the two recommendations. There are some others on the page here. Let's just scroll down here. There are several hosts we recommend here. SiteGround and Kinsta are a couple of the other ones. If you're on something like GoDaddy, HostGator, Bluehost, something like that, or Crazy Domains in Australia, those are generally poor quality hosts and you're not going to get a great result. Good hosting is the foundation of that. If you're paying the price of a cup of coffee a month, that's probably not great hosting. You really need to be at the cost of a nice lunch, so 30, 50, 100 bucks a month, something like that as a minimum benchmark for good hosting. Anything less than 10 bucks a month is probably not good enough. I will say that Cloudways do have a base plan that's 10 or 12 bucks a month and it's really good at that price. That would be the bare minimum entry level, so if you're looking for cheap hosting, that's the way to go.

13:32Caching Plugins: WP Rocket vs FlyingPress

All right, next one. You need caching. Just to understand what caching is: when WordPress sends a page to the visitor, it needs to do a bunch of database lookups. It needs to do a bunch of PHP processing. There's a whole bunch of things it needs to do to send that page to the visitor. Ultimately what caching does is build that page and save a copy on the server. When a visitor hits the site, the page is ready to go. It's already built, all those database lookups are done, all that crunching, PHP processing is done, and the server just sends the page. That's what a page cache is.

There are two plugins we recommend here. They're both paid plugins, but they're both very good. Either the WP Rocket plugin, at wprocketplugin.com, you'll see here it's on the page, or FlyingPress, at flyingpress.net. Those are the only two plugins we recommend, and we talk about it here. The main difference between the two is that WP Rocket is a bit more conservative and a bit more DIY friendly. It is not as fast as FlyingPress, but if you're DIY and you're not so technical, WP Rocket would be the way to go. If you're technical, or you're a marketer or an agency and you have time to fiddle with this stuff, FlyingPress would probably be a better option. It can make the site faster, but it has a lot more things that can break the site. So just keep that in mind. If you're DIYing, or the site needs reliability and you need to be more conservative with speed, WP Rocket is probably a better fit. If you want as fast as possible, FlyingPress. That's the main difference between the two. Most caching plugins do roughly the same set of stuff. FlyingPress just does more and more aggressively.

Important to keep in mind as well, you don't want to use two caching plugins, but you can use multiple optimization plugins. There's a difference between caching and optimization. These two plugins will do caching, but they also do a whole bunch of optimization as well, things like lazy loading or CSS optimization. An important point here is if you use multiple plugins, for example using FlyingPress and Perfmatters, which is something we commonly do, you don't want to duplicate optimizations. You don't want to use two sets of lazy loading. You don't want to use two sets of JavaScript or CSS optimization. Just have one of the plugins doing it. They can both be installed. You could have Perfmatters and FlyingPress, they can both be installed, but make sure that the settings don't overlap. That's an important thing to keep in mind.

Some hosting providers do have caching built in. WP Engine and Kinsta do, there's a whole bunch of others, or they may have their own caching plugin. Even if the hosting has caching, like WP Engine for example, something like WP Rocket will help prime that cache and manage it better. Like I said, these plugins don't just do caching, they do optimization on top of that, so it will help manage the cache better, but it will also help optimize other things. Just keep that in mind. But you need caching. Without caching, WordPress will just run slowly. Every page needs to do those database lookups and PHP processing and it's just slow. When we talk about bypassing caching, or caching not working, or Time to First Byte being bad, that's an instance where for some reason that cache is not working for a particular page or type of traffic or type of URL. It may need some tweaking and customization, so just keep that in mind as well. But anyway, you need caching. Those are the two plugins we recommend. They're both paid, but they're both quite cheap at 59 bucks a year. Very good value. They're amazing.

17:03Cloudflare CDN and APO

You need a content delivery network. Let's talk about the next one. CDN is a content delivery network. It is a group of servers around the world that host some or all of the website and serve it up. There are a few different reasons why we would recommend Cloudflare as the only option. One, they have a great free plan. Two, they are a content delivery network, they are a firewall and security service, and they do a whole bunch of optimizations. For that reason they are a no-brainer. They're pretty much the biggest CDN in the world. The free plan will do a whole bunch of stuff. The next plan up is five bucks a month. It does Cloudflare APO. What that does is, normally the CDN would do things like cache a copy of the images and CSS files and the JavaScript. It would not cache the HTML file. What this APO service does is cache the HTML file as well. So the entire pages are being served mostly from the CDN.

The point of that is it moves the workload off the hosting onto the CDN service. You've got a $50 a month hosting plan and then all of a sudden you've got thousands of extra servers as horsepower to serve up your website, and if you get a traffic spike or something, they can absorb the load and it's dirt cheap or even free. That's the point of a CDN and that's the point of the APO service. It basically hosts the entire site on Cloudflare. If you're doing paid traffic, APO is a no-brainer. Or if you have international traffic, it is also a no-brainer, because it distributes the site to all the Cloudflare nodes. If I'm in Australia accessing a site in the US, and the site has Cloudflare APO, then it's going to load the site from the closest server to me in Sydney or Melbourne or wherever I am, as opposed to having to go to the server in the US, grab the data and pull it back. So the CDN distributes the load, or moves the workload off the hosting. It removes the impact of geography.

If you're using Cloudflare, there's a whole bunch of security features and a lot of things you can do there to block scrapers and crawlers and things like that. There's a bunch of speed optimizations Cloudflare can do. Some of them you can do in a caching plugin, some of them you do in Cloudflare. It can also do various other things like redirects for SEO and things like that. It's very powerful. That's why we recommend it. Never use two CDNs together. We see this quite a lot. Don't use WP Rocket and their CDN and Cloudflare. Two CDNs stacked on top of each other duplicate work and make things slower overall. Just keep that in mind. If you're using FlyingPress, it has a built-in Cloudflare integration that effectively does what this APO service does. So if you're on a tight budget, get the FlyingPress plugin and it gives you this APO-type feature for nothing. That's a really good benefit of going with FlyingPress over WP Rocket.

19:48Reducing Page Size With Compression and Lazy Loading

Okay, next one. Reduce page sizes. Compress images, use lazy loading, basically reduce the page size as much as possible. A simple one we see all the time is that images have not been compressed, straight up, and they just need to be compressed, or you're using the PNG image file format where the JPEG file format would be smaller. You might have a 1 megabyte PNG. If you use a JPEG, it's 0.2 of a megabyte. Some of that comes from Canva. Canva by default downloads in PNG format, so a lot of content writers are using Canva to make images and then they download PNG files, which are huge, as opposed to a JPEG, which would be much smaller. That can be the reason in many cases. So compress the images. These are the two plugins we recommend, EWWW Image Optimizer or ShortPixel. Again, FlyingPress now does image optimization as well, so it's another benefit of using that plugin.

You want to use lazy loading as well. Let's just talk about this. Yeah, there we go. We've got compressed images here. This area that is viewable now is called above the fold. Everything below the page that I can't see is below the fold. What lazy loading does is it doesn't load anything below the fold until I scroll down close to it. When I first load the page, only these images load. This image and this YouTube video and these images here, nothing else further down the page has loaded. That lightens the page load, so it makes it much lighter, so it loads faster.

Now you really want to be under 3 megabytes. Just due to the speed of internet connections and the mathematics of it, if you're over 3 megabytes, the page will start to feel slow in a lot of cases. It will just feel heavy and you'll likely start to fail Core Web Vitals once you're over that threshold. That would be something to aim for. A really easy way to deal with page sizes is, when you push a new page live, run it through a speed test and it will tell you how big it is and if there's an issue there. If it's over 3 megabytes, have a look at what's on the page and compress the images or whatever needs to be done. YouTube videos are also very heavy. They're 6 megabytes. If you have a whole bunch of YouTube videos on a page, they're going to be heavy and slow things down, so keep that in mind.

22:07HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 Support, PHP Version and 404 Errors

Let's talk about these two protocols. This is a common one we see. There's a third protocol here. Well, there's actually a fourth one, but I'll just put a note here, versus HTTP/1.1. There's also 1.0, but let's not get too much into it. Basically, a lot of old hosting or bad quality hosting only supports HTTP/1.1. It hasn't been configured for these two newer protocols. This protocol is 50 to 100% faster than this one. That's a huge speed boost. The main difference between version 1.1 and version 2, and we have a demo video here actually, let's just play this so you can see the difference. Let's see if this works, running this live. This is a load of HTTP/2 on the left versus HTTP/1.1. You can see the difference there.

The main point here is that with version 1.1, say if you have 100 files on the page, the browser needs to make 100 connections to download all those files. There's a lot of overhead for that. If you have version 2, it makes one connection and downloads all the files over that. That's why you saw that mosaic load so much faster on the left-hand side, because it's using that faster protocol. This protocol here, HTTP/3, is another 10 to 20% faster on top of HTTP/2, so ideally you want to have this support. All modern hosting supports the HTTP/3 protocol. Some poor quality, cheap hosting doesn't, so just keep that in mind. Again, that's another thing about you get what you pay for. If you're paying two bucks a month for hosting, you can't expect much.

If you just Google HTTP/2 or HTTP/3 checker, you get a whole bunch of tools out there. You put your website in, it will tell you if the protocol is enabled or supported. The bottom line there is you need that protocol support. If you don't have it on your hosting, email your host or log a support ticket. If they're not going to support it or fix it, go somewhere else. It's that important.

All right, PHP version. WordPress runs on PHP, the programming language. Each version of PHP is faster and lighter and better. We're at version 8.5 right now as I'm making this video. You want to use the highest version of PHP that your site supports. You can't just change this version number though. There'll be a setting in your hosting to change the PHP version, but you can't just change it and expect it to work, because it might break things, because things might not be compatible. Your site might only be compatible right now with version 8.3 and not work on 8.5. There might be a plugin that doesn't work with version 8.5, so keep that in mind. Most hosts have a testing tool built in that will test all the plugins and confirm whether there is support there, and if not, it'll tell you, hey, this plugin doesn't support it. Go find an update for it, or maybe you have to talk to their plugin support and figure it out. But use the highest version of PHP your site supports. That will speed things up. You also need to use opcode caching. Opcode caching is a type of caching for PHP that often needs to be enabled on the hosting.

Okay, two more. Remove or disable any old code or any plugins. The fewer plugins the site has, the faster it's going to be, in general, not always. The less third-party code you're using, the faster it's going to be. So just do an audit on plugins and code. If you're not using it, get rid of it. Often we see sites with old live chat plugins, or things they canceled the subscription for years ago, that are still embedded on the site, making it slow.

Fix 404 errors. This is a really common one. You have a super fast site, but something is generating a 404 error. That's an easy one to fix and can cause the browser to be slow, can be laggy, can do weird things. So do a check for 404 errors. There are a few ways to test that. You can use an SEO audit tool. Over at our website, we have our Site Speed Bot website test tool. If you go here to free tools, WordPress speed test, it'll test a lot of this stuff. It'll test the HTTP/2, HTTP/3, it'll test for the page size, and it will test for 404 errors as well. So go in there and it will give you a breakdown of what's wrong with the site and what you need to do to fix things and make it fast.

26:08Where to Go Next and Free Tools

That's pretty much it. That is the big stuff. I'll keep it at that. There is a lot more on the page here and there are a lot of links to various things, fixing slow WooCommerce, fixing slow back end, talking about Cloudflare and APO and education and things here. It explains a bit more about what's going on and how site speed affects SEO. There's a lot there, but that'll give you a good starting point and I hope that was useful for you.

Like I said, there are a range of tools on our WP Speed Fix website. A free SEO audit that will also check for 404s, the Core Web Vitals report, and the WordPress speed test you saw. The Core Web Vitals report takes 5 to 10 seconds, but the other two take 60 seconds or so, and there's no opt-in required. You can go ahead and use those as much as you want, and then subscribe to our mailing list. Obviously you have to opt into that. That's pretty much it. There's a whole bunch of stuff on our channel, and like I said, if there's a particular area of WordPress where it's logged-in users, back end, or something else that's slow, WooCommerce cart or checkout, we do have videos on those as well, so check out the channel. If there's anything else, post in the comments. If you need help with your site, if you want paid help, go to wpspeedfix.com, click the Get a Free Site Audit button, fill out the form here, and one of the team will review your site, come back to you and tell you how we can help or what needs to be done, and what to do from there. Cheers.