With WordPress powering over 40% of all websites on the web, according to statistics from W3Techs, you’ve probably used it to build your website after hearing so many recommendations for it and are now wondering how to optimize that website for performance.
After all, site speed is an important ranking factor and a requirement if you want to increase conversions.
Improving WordPress performance involves choosing a good host, using a well-designed WordPress theme, installing performance plugins, choosing the right plugins and optimizing content on your website, especially images.
In this post, I share tips on how to optimize your WordPress site for performance.
Warning: Always create a backup before making changes to your WordPress site.
WordPress Performance Optimization: Overview
A WordPress site, like all websites, is a collection of code hosted on a web server. Therefore, like all websites, a WordPress site’s performance is based on the performance of your hosting environment as well as the performance of your code.
This is why the best decisions you can make in terms of launching a WordPress site are choosing a good host, installing a lightweight theme and researching plugins carefully to ensure they perform well.
Beyond that, there are several additional ways to improve the performance of a WordPress site:
- Using a CDN
- Installing a caching plugin
- Optimizing your site’s database
- Optimizing images
- Enabling lazy loading
- Offloading content
- Keeping the number of ads that display to a minimum
- Keeping up with WordPress updates
Following these guidelines will greatly improve the performance of your WordPress site.
The Two Pillars of WordPress Performance: Hosting and Your Theme
You can do a lot to improve the performance of your WordPress site by choosing a decent WordPress host and installing a lightweight theme.
The right kind of hosting reduces performance issues caused by inadequate server hardware, a crowded hosting environment and improper server maintenance.
The right kind of WordPress theme improves performance by keeping your site clean of poorly-optimized code that produces heavy page designs, which take a while to load.
Choosing the Right WordPress Host
Unfortunately, there’s not really a single WordPress host that’s better than the rest, so I can’t really tell you to just choose one host or another and call it a day.
I can tell you that the type of hosting you choose plays a huge role in how well your site performs:
- Shared hosting – $
- Poor to OK performance
- Your website shares resources with other websites hosted on the same server
- Best for low-traffic sites
- VPS hosting – $$
- Good to very good performance
- Your website takes up a private space on a shared server, but you don’t share resources as you do in a shared hosting environment
- Best for medium-traffic sites
- Cloud hosting – $$$*
- Very good to great performance
- Your site is hosted by a network of machines that can scale (draw on more resources) as needed
- Best for high-traffic sites and ecommerce sites
- Dedicated hosting – $$$$
- Very good to great performance
- Your site has its very own hosting server all to itself
- Best for very high-traffic sites
*Cloud hosting can sometimes be cheaper than VPS hosting, but because it’s designed to scale and you’re often charged based on the number of resources you use, it can get expensive unexpectedly.
VPS hosting and cloud hosting are best in terms of cost to performance.
WordPress has a special kind of hosting called “managed WordPress hosting.” Hosts in this category typically offer VPS and cloud hosting environments and take care of security, performance and WordPress updates on your behalf.
Check out our maintenance plans at wpXPRESS if you’re interested in cloud hosting alongside WordPress maintenance services.
Choosing the Right WordPress Theme
The best way to ensure your WordPress site runs as smoothly as possible would be to hire a developer to create a custom theme and built-in plugins.
Unfortunately, this is pretty expensive and will lock you into working with a developer so long as you need your site.
If you don’t have the budget to work with a developer, I highly recommend choosing a lightweight third-party theme instead, such as block-based themes like GeneratePress and Kadence. These are themes that work with the default block editor in WordPress.
OceanWP and Astra are great options as well as they both have templates that are designed to work with the block editor.
Page building themes powered by Divi, Elementor (with Hello theme) and Beaver Builder (plus similar page builders) require careful building and a more advanced optimization setup to ensure they perform well, but they’re still viable options, and quite popular, too.
A lot of developers like Bricks, but it has a steep learning curve in comparison to the other options I listed on this page.
Most of these options have free versions you can try out. Divi and Bricks do not, but Bricks does have a demo you can test.
How to Speed Up Your WordPress Site
Improve the performance of your WordPress site by implementing the following:
- Use a CDN
- Upgrade your site to use the current standard PHP version
- Install an optimization plugin like Perfmatters
- Install a caching plugin
- Optimize your database regularly
- Choose the right plugins by avoiding plugins that have a poor reputation for performance
- Uninstall plugins you’re no longer using
- Choose the correct format for images
- Compress images, preferably before uploading them
- Remove images that are no longer displayed on your site
- Embed video and audio files from sources like YouTube, Vimeo and SoundCloud. Don’t upload them to your web server
- Enable lazy loading for images
- Offload content to an external storage server
- Reduce the number of ads displayed on your site
- Keep up with WordPress updates
Use a CDN
A content delivery network (CDN) helps users load content on your website faster by distributing it across a network of servers located around the world.
Cloudflare is the best option for WordPress sites. Other popular solutions include Amazon CloudFront, Fastly, Bunny.net and KeyCDN.
Upgrade to the Current Standard PHP Version
WordPress is built on a programming language called PHP, which receives regular updates available as packaged versions.
As of June 2026, WordPress is fully compatible with PHP 8.3 with beta support added for PHP versions 8.4 and 8.5.
Upgrading to PHP 8.3 will vastly improve the performance of your website, but make sure your theme and plugins are compatible with PHP 8.3 before upgrading.
Install Perfmatters
Optimize your WordPress site in numerous ways with Perfmatters.
It’s a simple performance optimization plugin that allows you to disable specific elements, view the size of individual plugins, optimize your database, enable lazy loading, minify JS and CSS, defer JS, enable preloading, and more.
Install a Caching Plugin
Caching loads web pages faster for users by storing copies of those web pages in users’ browsers.
If your caching plugin allows preloading, your users can load your website even faster as their browsers will have preloaded a cached version of your site before they even visit it.
Popular caching plugins include WP Rocket, LiteSpeed Cache, NitroPack, WP Super Cache, WP Fastest Cache, FlyingPress and W3 Total Cache.
Optimize Your Database Regularly
A WordPress site’s database stores all of the data that makes up a WordPress site including user credentials, pages, themes and plugins.
The problem is that any new data your site generates often creates new tables in the database. This can lead to performance issues, especially if the database contains tables it no longer needs.
Clean your database at least once a month with Perfmatters or a database cleanup plugin like Advanced Database Cleaner.
Choose the Right Plugins
Many articles on WordPress optimization recommend limiting the number of plugins you use, but this is a misleading tip.
It only takes one poorly-optimized plugin to bring down your site’s performance.
Research plugins carefully, and avoid plugins that have poor reputations.
Use Perfmatters to view the size of each plugin, and determine if you truly need plugins that seem much larger than others.
Remove Unused Plugins
An easy way to optimize your WordPress site is by removing plugins you no longer need or don’t need constantly.
For instance, if you optimize your website with Advanced Database Cleaner, consider uninstalling it after you clean your database and reinstalling it when you need it again.
Optimize Media
Images are often the biggest content elements browsers need to load on a web page. Optimize them by:
- Choosing the correct format, which is JPEG for regular photos and PNG for screenshots and graphics
- Compressing images, preferably before you upload them. I use TinyPNG to compress images
- Removing images you no longer need
Display Fewer Ads On Your Site
Ads may be a huge source of revenue for your business, but unfortunately, they’re very resource intensive and often make your site difficult to load and use.
If you display ads on your site, test their impact on your site’s performance from different devices to determine if you need to cut back on how many you display.
Keep Up with WordPress Updates
Themes, plugins and WordPress itself receive regular updates from their developers to optimize them for security and performance.
Be sure to keep up with WordPress updates by checking at least once a month, though weekly or bi-weekly would be better.
Consider using a WordPress maintenance service if you need help maintaining your site.
0 Comments