How to increase website speed?

There are a variety of ways to boost the performance of a site ranging from content delivery networks, compression, lazy loading, system fonts, deploying well-developed/designed themes plus plugins, minifying JS and CSS, hosting and more. If you’re open to sharing a link to your website in the post or as direct message, it’ll be easier to share suggestions. You could also quickly search online for a speed/performance checklist and work your way through it.

Last year, I started talking about the core web vitals of my site hitting 99 page speed on mobile. This is the discussion, I hope it gives you some insights. [https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/rffqmi/core_web_vitals_all_average_99_with_woocommerce/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/rffqmi/core_web_vitals_all_average_99_with_woocommerce/)

This year, I hit 100/100 on WooCommerce without using static cache plugin. (but not all pages are optimized because my app is under active development. Avoid premature optimisation)

Here are a few tips from my experiments. Hope it is useful for u.

1. Use a lightweight theme
2. Pick a good hosting
3. Don’t relay on multiple page builders, pick one.
4. Remove bloated & unmaintained plugins at all cost
5. Upgrade PHP to 8.2 if possible. PHP 8.1 if you got issue on 8.2, change back to 8.1 because it’s fully support yet.
6. Use CDN
7. Database cache (Memcached/ redis)

Once you follow some of these, you’ll start to see some improvements.

Unoptimized images are usually the first culprit. Along with bloated CSS and unminimized .js and .css files

I would advice to first run a page speed test on https://pagespeed.web.dev/

Then fix the biggest bottlenecks first and work your way down.

There is a LOT you can do after the fact, but in my experience, it’s often theme-related that can be mitigated to SOME degree by all the recommendations people here are giving, but you really should do it all.

The word “development” has many meanings depending on who you ask here in this sub. Many here love making their own themes, often motivated by speed.

I, myself, believe that “web design is dead” as literally every function has been templated to death, so why should I spend a moment making custom themes when my client or I can pay a tiny amount for almost everything I’d ever want and focus on putting content into the blocks provided.

In terms of themes, you have to look closely at those, and builders are often worse.

Contrary to popular thought here- for example, someone said that “Elementor is the Flash of web development,” SOME themes and builders can be very fast. Shoptimizer or Hello Elementor are examples.

Many hosts also do a decent job, including many of the things you used to buy plugins for or offer their own integrated plugins. For example, we typically use Siteground, so we have a couple of plugins for optimizing speed and security instead of using plugins like Wordfence or WP-Rocket.

The downside of such plugins is that, if you aren’t careful, you can break your site in various ways.

So, it’s NOT JUST about “speed.” Or ONLY speed, I should say.

Here are my general bullet points:

1. Hosting
2. Integrations between hosting and plugins
3. Themes
4. Content Delivery Networks

The easiest way is to use some cache plugins, you can get boost directly

https://www.webpagetest.org will tell you in great detail what’s going on, then you will have some hard data to tell you if your problems are graphics or hosting or something else.