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Speed up a slow WordPress site

Work through caching, images, plugins and the database in the order that actually pays off.

7 min readUEB3 Tech documentation

Site speed work has a natural order. Doing it in the wrong order means spending an afternoon compressing images while an uncached PHP page is costing you two seconds on every request.

1. Confirm caching is on

On our WordPress plans, LiteSpeed Cache is installed and configured. Check that it is still enabled and that no plugin update disabled it. Load a page twice and look for the x-litespeed-cache: hit header — if it says miss on every request, something is preventing caching, usually a session cookie set on every page.

2. Fix your images

Images are usually the largest thing on the page. Serve them in WebP, size them to the dimensions they are actually displayed at, and let LiteSpeed Cache handle lazy loading below the fold.

3. Audit your plugins

Install Query Monitor, load a slow page and look at the query count and the slowest queries. A single badly written plugin adding two hundred queries per page load is a common finding, and no amount of caching hides it for logged-in users.

4. Add object caching

Redis object caching is included on WP Grow and WP Scale. It stores the results of repeated database queries in memory, which matters most for WooCommerce and for admin screens that cannot be page-cached at all.

5. Clean the database

Post revisions, expired transients and orphaned metadata accumulate over years. Clearing them will not transform a site, but on a long-running install it is a real improvement for a few minutes of work.

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