WordPress
Why your WordPress site is slow, in order of likelihood
Before you buy another caching plugin: the five causes that account for most slow sites, and how to check each in five minutes.
Slow WordPress sites are slow for a small number of reasons, and they occur in a fairly predictable order. Work down the list rather than buying a plugin and hoping.
1. Unoptimised images
Still the single biggest cause. A 4MB photograph straight from a phone, displayed at 600 pixels wide. Check: open the page, look at the network panel, sort by size. If any image is over 300KB, that is your problem. Fix: resize before upload, serve WebP, and let WordPress generate the responsive srcset it has supported for years.
2. Cheap shared hosting
If the server takes 800ms to produce the HTML, nothing on the front end will save you. Check: the "time to first byte" in any speed test. Anything over 600ms is the host, not the site. Fix: move. A small VPS or decent managed WordPress hosting is €15–40 a month and is usually the single highest-return change available.
3. Page builder bloat
Some builders load their entire CSS and JS on every page whether used or not, plus a font library you are not using. Check: count the requests. Fix: disable unused modules, dequeue the icon fonts, and consider whether a custom theme would be cheaper over five years than fighting this every month.
4. Too many third-party scripts
Analytics, heatmaps, chat widget, two pixels, a review badge, a font from Google. Each one is a DNS lookup, a connection and a file. Check: the third-party summary in PageSpeed Insights. Fix: remove what nobody reads, self-host fonts, and load chat on interaction rather than on load.
5. Database bloat
Ten years of post revisions, expired transients and orphaned metadata. Check: the size of wp_options and how many rows have autoload = yes. Anything over a megabyte of autoloaded options is slowing every single page. Fix: clean transients, limit revisions in wp-config.php, remove leftovers from deleted plugins.
What to measure
Use field data, not lab scores. A green Lighthouse number on your fast laptop says little. Core Web Vitals in Search Console show what actual visitors experienced — that is the number Google uses and the one your customers feel.
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