The speed of your website plays an important role in user experience and search engine rankings. Slow sites often lead to higher bounce rates, decreased user satisfaction, and lost revenue. As a digital marketing and web development agency, we optimise website performance to keep visitors engaged and ensure websites run smoothly. We are specialists in WordPress sites.
Here, we explore 9 effective strategies for speeding up a WordPress website. From removing unnecessary plugins to optimising images, these tips help enhance a site’s performance and deliver a better user experience.
If your business’s WordPress site has a slow page speed and you want a fast-loading website to boost your brand’s success, contact our team today. We can help ensure your slow site runs faster and that your overall performance improves.
Why is site speed so important?
Site speeds are crucial because they significantly impact user experience, search engine rankings, and conversion rates. Faster-loading websites enhance user experience by reducing wait times, which decreases bounce rates and encourages visitors to stay longer and engage more with your content.
Search engines like Google use site speed as a ranking factor, meaning that faster websites are more likely to rank higher in search results, attracting more organic traffic. Improved site speeds also lead to higher conversion rates, as users are less likely to abandon slow-loading pages during the purchase or enquiry process. You can easily test the load speed of any pages on your website using free tools such as Google’s PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix.
How to speed up WordPress websites
1. Choose a fast theme
Selecting a fast theme that is optimised for speed can drastically reduce your WordPress website’s loading times. These themes are engineered with a focus on speed, leveraging clean code and minimal design elements that streamline page rendering. This technical precision improves load times and can benefit your user experience and SEO rankings.
When you opt for a fast theme, it generally prioritises essential features and functionality, avoiding the bloat that can slow down page speeds.
2. Remove any unnecessary plugins
Deactivating and deleting any plugins that aren’t essential to your website’s core functionality is an effective way to speed up your WordPress website. Each plugin adds a layer of code that your site must load, which can bog down your site speed, particularly if these are unused plugins.
Here are some steps to follow when managing WordPress plugins:
- Audit regularly: Periodically review your plugin inventory to identify any that are inactive or no longer useful.
- Measure impact: Use tools to measure each plugin’s performance impact. Identify which ones significantly slow your website.
- Check security: Unused plugins can become security vulnerabilities. Ensure all active plugins are secure and necessary.
- Quality over quantity: Opt for a few well-coded plugins that deliver the functionality you need rather than having multiple plugins that overlap in features.
This approach enhances site speed and reduces potential security risks and server load, contributing to a more robust and faster WordPress site.
3. Optimise images
Image optimisation involves several key practices that directly impact your site’s performance:
- Compress images: By reducing the file size without sacrificing quality, you’re ensuring faster loading times and using less bandwidth. Compression plugins can automate this process, streamlining efficiency.
- Resize images: Always resize image files to match the dimensions they’ll appear on your website. Uploading unnecessarily large images and then scaling them down via CSS only wastes resources, as the browser still loads the full image.
- Implement lazy loading: This method defers the loading of image files until they’re actually needed, i.e., when they enter the browser’s viewport. This accelerates initial page load times and saves additional bandwidth by not loading off-screen images that the user might never see.
4. Minify CSS, HTML, and JavaScript
Minifying CSS, HTML, and JavaScript is essential to further reduce load times and enhance your site’s performance. Minification takes out unnecessary data from your code files. This process involves eliminating whitespace, removing comments, and simplifying your code without altering its functionality.
By implementing minification, you’re reducing the file size and decreasing the number of HTTP requests your site makes, directly contributing to faster page loading times.
Many useful tools can automate this process, but be careful. If minification is not configured carefully and correctly, it is easy to break your website’s look and feel.

5. Delay third-party scripts
While minification reduces file sizes, delaying third-party scripts allows primary content to load without interference. Third-party scripts, such as those from advertising networks, social media platforms, and analytics services, can significantly bog down website loading times. By delaying these scripts, the essential elements of web pages are prioritised.
Consider using lazy loading techniques to effectively delay third-party scripts. This approach involves deferring script loading until they’re actually needed, typically when they enter the viewport or upon user interaction. This reduces the initial load time and conserves bandwidth for both you and your site visitors.
Prioritising the loading order of your content and scripts also ensures that the most important aspects of your site become visible to users as quickly as possible without waiting for less crucial resources to load.
6. Remove and reduce redirects
Reducing redirects on your WordPress site streamlines the user’s journey, enhancing the overall browsing speed and SEO performance. Every redirect you eliminate means fewer HTTP requests, improving the page speed and delivering a smoother browsing experience.
Best practices for reducing redirects include auditing your site’s URLs and eliminating redirect chains, using direct links in your content, avoiding redirect loops, and simplifying URL structure (which can reduce the need for redirects).
7. Disable pingbacks
By disabling pingbacks, you’re essentially stopping your site from sending and receiving notifications of links from other blogs. This reduced communication between servers can drastically reduce the number of database queries your site needs to handle.
In addition to improving WordPress site speed, this can also protect a website from potential spam and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that exploit this feature.
8. Optimise your site’s WordPress database
Over time, your database accumulates unnecessary data, like post revisions, spam comments, and trash items, which can slow down performance. Regularly cleaning your database with a trusted plugin can automate the removal of redundant data, optimise database tables, and ensure only essential information is stored. This reduces the database size and server load, speeding up data retrieval and overall site performance.
Optimising database tables by defragmenting them can further improve access efficiency. Most database management tools offer options to optimise tables easily. Implementing a caching plugin also helps by storing static versions of your site, reducing the need for database queries for each page load.
9. Consider your hosting network
If your site is slow, evaluating your choice of hosting provider is important, as their network capabilities can significantly influence your WordPress site’s performance. When selecting a provider, consider the cost and quality of their web server and server resources. The physical location of servers plays a pivotal role in reducing latency, especially if your audience is geographically specific.
Look for a hosting provider that offers CDN integration. A Content Delivery Network (CDN) can drastically reduce load times by caching your content in multiple locations around the world, ensuring that your visitors access data from the nearest server. This integration is crucial for enhancing user experience and boosting your site’s SEO.
Don’t overlook the importance of optimised server configurations. Managed WordPress hosting solutions often provide specific configurations that are tailored for WordPress performance, handling traffic surges and minimising downtime effectively.
Benefit from a fast WordPress site with britweb
At britweb, our team of developers are highly skilled and experienced in creating WordPress sites for businesses that are engaging to users, SEO-friendly, and have a fast load speed to help ensure success online. If you are one of our supported web hosting clients, we keep an eye on your website’s speed, so you don’t have to.
Don’t hesitate to contact us today to discuss your WordPress website. Our friendly and professional team will help you with the next steps so you don’t have a slow website holding you back.
To learn more about how we work with clients, discover our approach and the benefits of working with us, and take a look at some of our recent case studies.