4 Tips to Increase Your WordPress Site Speed and Performance

Site performance is a key measure of a site’s effectiveness and every site owner knows why. You only get one chance to make a first impression and your site is increasingly that first impression. A slow site not only impacts your SEO, but it erodes trust with your visitors and can have a direct impact on sales conversions.

Luckily there are several simple, fast speed fixes that most sites can make.

Check out our top four below.Here’s a simple fact about site optimization: the slower your site loads, the more likely people are to leave. So if your page is taking forever to load, you’re losing both potential conversions and customers.

Why Speed Matters

And while it just seems like conventional wisdom at this point, the data supports the importance of site speed. 

Data like that found in Illustrate Digital’s 2024 Global Page Speed report, which shows conversion rates drop 4.42 percent for each additional second users have to wait between 0 to 5 seconds. 

Or data from Reboot’s 2025 Web Statistics report showing just a 1 second delay in loading speed reduces page views as much as 11%. They also found that 47% of site visitors give up if the site takes more than 2 seconds to load. 

On top of all of that, Google says a key metric in organic search is largest contentful paint (LCP) time and that in order to provide a good user experience, LCP should be 2.5 seconds or less.

Our Top Tips on Improving Website Performance

Knowing all of this, how do you improve your site performance? As an industry leader in managed hosting for WordPress^®, we’ve seen what works and what doesn’t. Here are four tried and tested means to improving your site’s performance:

Optimize Creative Assets

High resolution images sound ideal, but they come at the cost of load time and most users won’t even notice.

You are much better served by compressing and downsizing your images in a way that doesn’t compromise quality. This helps keep load times low and is best done as you create your images. That said, there are also tons of free tools to help with this like ImageOptim or TinyPNG.

Optimize Your Plugins

One thing with the potential to slow down WordPress^® sites is plugins. It’s essential when you’re trying to optimize WordPress performance, to critically evaluate plugins and how they impact performance.

The first step is to only use plugins that are strictly necessary for site functionality. Even then, take note of your site’s speed before and after you install it. If performance goes down, look for another option. That said, you won’t always be able to find a faster option. At the end of the day, you’ll need to assess if the functionality is worth the hit to performance.

Want more info on plugins we recommend? Check out WP Engine’s Ultimate Guide to Plugins.

Lazy-load Long Pages

For one-page sites or sites with a long home page, lazy-loading can be a real time saver. Lazy-loading essentially prevents the elements lower on your page from loading until the visitor scrolls to that point. By not loading all the content of your page at once, your site can render faster. A common plugin used for lazy loading is Lazy Load by WP Rocket.

Alternatively, choosing a host that prioritizes performance and includes features like caching and use of a content delivery network (CDN) may eliminate the need for another plugin.

Use a Host with a Built-in CDN and Caching

For instance, when using a managed host like WP Engine, you’ll have features like a global CDN and robust caching. These features ensure needed content loads quickly for your site visitors, no matter where they are. For instance, sites hosted with WP Engine have shown an average site speed improvement of 68%. 

The key to this is inherent in how CDNs work. When someone visits your site, a CDN severs content from the closest server to their physical location.

On top of built-in CDN and caching, we also offer products to optimize your WordPress instance like Page Speed Boost. Check out this quick video to see how it improves site performance:

Conclusion

So that’s our top tips for improving your site performance and page loading speed. To summarize: optimize your creative assets and plugins, lazy-load long pages, and use a host that is tuned for performance. Easy, right?

Ready to optimize your WordPress^® site for performance? Explore our solutions to get started today. Still have questions? Dive deeper into what using a managed host for WordPress® means for businesses like yours.