If your WordPress site takes four or five seconds to load, you are losing people before they ever see it. I am Adam, a web developer in Hull, and speeding up slow WordPress sites is one of the jobs I get asked about most. The good news is that the same handful of problems cause most of it, and most of them are fixable without rebuilding anything.
This is the practical version. If you want the diagnosis first (why sites end up slow in the first place), I wrote a separate piece on that; this one is the fix list, roughly in the order I work through it on a real project.
Start by measuring, not guessing
Before you change a single thing, get a number. Run your site through a free tool like PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix and note the loading time and the biggest problems it flags. Do it from a phone as well as a laptop, because plenty of Hull businesses get most of their visitors on mobile and a site can be fine on a desktop and painful on a phone. Write the numbers down. You want to know whether what you do next actually helps.
Sort your hosting out first
Cheap shared hosting is the most common reason a site feels sluggish, and no plugin will paper over it. If you are paying three or four pounds a month and sharing a server with hundreds of other sites, your visitors are waiting in a queue. Moving to decent managed WordPress hosting, or a good UK host with proper resources, is often the single biggest speed win you can buy. I have taken sites from five seconds to under two just by moving them, before touching anything else.
Add caching
Caching means the server builds your page once and then hands out a saved copy, instead of rebuilding it from the database for every visitor. For most sites a free plugin like WP Super Cache or W3 Total Cache does the job. Some good hosts have caching built in, in which case you may not need a plugin at all, and stacking two caching plugins on top of each other causes more problems than it solves. Set one up, clear it, and re-test. This alone often takes a second or more off the load time.
Fix your images
Images are where I find the most waste, every time. Someone uploads a photo straight off their phone at 4000 pixels wide and 6 megabytes, and WordPress serves that whole thing to display it at 400 pixels. Three things sort it out:
Resize photos before you upload them. Nothing on a normal site needs to be wider than about 2000 pixels.
Compress them. A plugin like ShortPixel or Smush shrinks the file size without you seeing a difference in quality.
Turn on lazy loading so images further down the page only load when someone scrolls to them. Recent WordPress does this on its own, but it is worth checking.
On a photo-heavy site this can halve the page weight. It is the highest-value hour you will spend.
Be honest about your plugins
Every plugin you install is more code to load. I regularly open a client's site and find 35 plugins, half of them doing something that was needed once in 2021 and never removed. Go through the list. Deactivate anything you do not recognise or use, test that nothing breaks, then delete it. Be especially wary of the all-in-one plugins that promise to do everything, sliders, page builders bolted onto page builders, and social feeds that phone home to another server on every page load. Fewer, better plugins beat a long list every time.
Clean up the database
Over the years WordPress fills its database with clutter: old post revisions, spam comments, leftover data from plugins you deleted. It quietly slows the site down. A tool like WP-Optimize will clear the junk out safely. Take a backup first, always, then let it tidy up. It is a five-minute job that most sites have never had done.
Watch your fonts and third-party scripts
Loading six custom fonts, a chat widget, two tracking scripts and an embedded map adds up fast, because each one is a request to someone else's server. Stick to one or two fonts. Question every widget: does the booking chat bubble that nobody clicks earn its place if it costs you half a second? Usually not. This is the part small business owners never think about, and it is often where a chunk of the delay hides.
Re-test, then keep an eye on it
When you have worked through the list, run the same speed tests again and compare them to the numbers you wrote down at the start. You should see a real difference. Then check it every few months, because sites drift back to slow as content and plugins pile up.
If you have been through all this and your site is still crawling, or you would rather someone just did it properly, that is exactly the sort of job I take on. Take a look at my WordPress services, or book a free 30-minute surgery through the contact page and I will tell you honestly what is slowing yours down and whether it is worth fixing or rebuilding. No jargon, no upsell.
Free 30-min surgery
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