WordPress Speed Optimization: A Complete Checklist

A slow WordPress site loses visitors, enquiries and rankings. I’ve taken sites from 6-second mobile load times to under 2 seconds without changing their design, simply by working through the layers below in order. Use this as your checklist.

Step 0: measure first#

• Search Console → Core Web Vitals: which URL groups fail, on mobile or desktop?
• PageSpeed Insights on your homepage, a blog post and a key landing page.
• Note TTFB, LCP, INP and CLS and the LCP element for each.
• Install Query Monitor (temporarily) to spot slow plugins and database queries.

1. Hosting and server#

• PHP 8.2 or 8.3 — significantly faster than PHP 7.x.
• Enough CPU/RAM; avoid oversold cheap shared hosting for business sites — see hosting types.
• Data centre close to your audience (Mumbai or Singapore for India).
• HTTP/2 or HTTP/3, Brotli compression, OPcache enabled.
• Target TTFB under 0.8 s.

2. Caching#

• Page caching: server-level (LiteSpeed, Nginx FastCGI, host caching) or one caching plugin.
• Object caching: Redis or Memcached for dynamic sites (WooCommerce, membership).
• CDN: Cloudflare or your host’s CDN for static files, optionally full-page edge caching — see Cloudflare setup.
• Browser caching: long cache lifetimes for versioned CSS/JS/images.

3. Images#

• Resize before uploading; nothing wider than ~2000 px for full-width images.
• Convert to WebP or AVIF and compress (image optimisation plugin or CDN).
• Keep native lazy loading for below-the-fold images; never lazy-load the hero — see lazy loading.
• Replace hero sliders with a single image or text.

4. JavaScript and CSS#

• Deactivate plugins you don’t need; unload plugin assets on pages that don’t use them.
• Defer scripts and delay non-critical third-party tags — see defer vs async and third-party scripts.
• Remove unused CSS / generate critical CSS — see CSS performance.
• Use facades for YouTube and Maps — see embeds guide.
• Consider replacing heavy page builders on key pages with block editor layouts.

5. Fonts#

Limit families and weights, use font-display: swap, and self-host if possible — see web fonts guide.

6. Database and backend#

• Clean post revisions, spam comments, expired transients and orphaned data — see database optimization.
• Limit revisions: define( 'WP_POST_REVISIONS', 10 );
• Check autoloaded options size (large autoload data slows every request).
• Control the Heartbeat API on admin-heavy sites.

7. Verify and monitor#

Re-test after each change so you know what helped. Field data in Search Console updates over 28 days. Re-check whenever you add a plugin or a marketing tag.