A checklist for a faster WordPress site
If a website doesn’t load quickly, people leave. And an unhappy visitor is worse than no visitor at all. That was how I opened in Stuttgart, and it is still true.
This talk became the template for all my performance talks after it. Here is the checklist.
Before the page loads
Pick proper hosting: shared is cheap but crowded, dedicated is powerful but needs looking after, cloud gives you room to grow. Use a fast DNS provider. Understand latency: every round trip between the visitor and your server costs time.
Images
Lazy-load offscreen images. Serve responsive sizes. Use lighter formats. WebP was the new black in 2019. Compress with TinyPNG, Smush or Optimizilla, and serve from a CDN such as S3 with CloudFront.
Fonts and caching
Use font-display: swap so text appears immediately. Add page, browser and object caching. Every cache layer you add is work your server doesn’t have to repeat.
Code
Inline critical CSS. Defer third-party embeds. Minify and compress everything with Gzip or Brotli. Preconnect to important origins and preload critical scripts.
Everything else
Serve lighter pages to people on slow connections. Plan for scaling before you need it. And remove plugins nobody uses. Bloat is the quiet killer of fast websites.
