Site speed is one of the top reasons users abandon a website. A slow-loading site not only frustrates visitors but also hurts your Google rankings. Page load time is a key factor in search engine algorithms, so optimizing your WordPress site for speed is critical to maintaining visibility and user engagement.
WordPress is a powerful platform, but it isn’t always the fastest out of the box. That’s why performance optimization should be a top priority—ensuring your site loads quickly and efficiently.
When it comes to speeding up your WordPress site, you have two main options:
DIY Optimization – If you’re technically inclined, there are countless resources available to guide you through the process. In fact, WordPress speed optimization isn’t particularly difficult if you’re comfortable with technical tasks.
Seek Expert Help – Even experienced developers can run into issues they can’t immediately diagnose. Despite using all the standard tools and best practices, you might still find your site loading slowly.
Many users attempt various tactics, including:
Installing caching plugins (e.g., WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache)
Enabling browser caching (often available within caching plugins)
Using a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Performing database optimization (with tools like WP-Optimize or Query Monitor)
Compressing and optimizing images (via WP Smush, Imagify, or Optimole)
Enabling lazy loading for images (with plugins like Rocket Lazy Load)
Minifying and optimizing CSS and JavaScript (via Perfmatters, Asset CleanUp, or Autoptimize)
Upgrading to premium hosting providers
Tuning server configurations for better performance
Still, these steps don’t always guarantee success—especially for those with limited technical experience. It can be overwhelming trying to troubleshoot performance issues on your own.
P.S. If you’re feeling adventurous and want to tackle speed optimization yourself, be sure to check out the section titled “Important Points to Work On for Any Site Speed Optimization Attempt” at the end of this blog post. It covers essential strategies that can make a real difference.
After optimizing over 800 WordPress websites, we’ve noticed a common pattern: most site owners skip the most crucial part of speed optimization—a comprehensive page speed analysis.
Yes, many use tools like GTmetrix or Google PageSpeed Insights to test their site’s performance. But here’s the issue: they often stop there, without digging deeper into what those tools are really saying.
These platforms throw around terms like:
First Contentful Paint (FCP)
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
Render-blocking resources
To the average site owner, this all sounds like technical noise and rightfully so. These metrics are important, but they don’t mean much unless they’re explained clearly and tied to real-world fixes.
At SmartersWeb, we believe in cutting through the jargon. We don’t just show you the problems – we help you understand why they’re slowing down your site and how to fix them in simple, practical terms.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed or stuck trying to figure out why your WordPress site is still slow despite your efforts, we’re here to help.
Request a Free WordPress Speed Audit
Let us break it down for you without the jargon, nor any guesswork. Just real, actionable insight.
When it comes to a web page in general, there can only be a few factors that cause slow page speed. Once you have a good understanding of how each of these factors impacts the site speed, your speed optimization journey will be so much smoother!
After performing my WordPress Speed Optimization Service on more than 800 websites, We’ve found that 80% of the WordPress websites are all having similar problems. Without further ado, let’s drill down to some of these important speed optimization factors:
Server Response Time (also known as Time-to-first-byte) is one of the most important factors to optimize for in any speed optimization effort. With a slow server response time, no amount of other speed optimization tweaks can save the load time.
Server response time is the time it takes for a web server to send back the first byte of a webpage in milliseconds. It’s often used as a performance metric to measure the speed of a website. Response time is affected by many factors, such as the type of web server, the load on the server, the network connection, and the distance between the server and the client.
In the case of WordPress sites, slow server response time is mainly due to the fact that WordPress runs on PHP. And it takes time for PHP to be executed before pure HTML can be served to the visitors.
If you want your site to load fast (especially on mobile), you need to keep the page size down, possibly under 1.5MB. If you really had to, 2MB of total page size is pretty much the maximum you are allowed.
Together with PageSize is Number of File Requests. To render the layout of your WordPress web page, external files such as JS, CSS, Images, Fonts and etc., need to be downloaded. These external files make up the Total Number of File Requests.
The Number of File Requests on any web page can be easily checked in GTmetrix. I normally wouldn’t recommend more than 80 file requests.
Image Size and Number of Images are both related to the previous point. The reason why I have to stress on this point specifically is that images are usually the Number 1 culprit causing large page size.
As a rule of thumb, I usually recommend that a single image be less than 80 KB.
If there is one concept you must understand when performing WordPress Speed Optimization, it’s Above-the-fold. In fact, the whole Core Web Vitals revolves around above-the-fold. Please view the following video I’ve prepared if you want to know more about how Above-the-fold affects PageSpeed Score (especially Mobile speed).
This term is no stranger to anyone who has used Google PageSpeed Insights to test their site.
This issue can be a little on the technical side, but what it really means is that – when you have too many CSS files to be downloaded, the browser has to halt the whole rendering process while downloading the CSS files.
In other words, the browser cannot render the page without first finish downloading all the CSS files being referenced on your page. Also, after the CSS files are downloaded, the browsers need to process the CSS files to actually render the final UI.
If you have too many CSS files, or if your CSS files are particularly large, the parsing process can be very time-consuming and cause delays in rendering the page.
In the same way that render-blocking CSS prevents a webpage from being rendered until all CSS is processed, JavaScript can also block the whole rendering process.
Another render-blocking resource commonly found on web pages are Custom Fonts. Modern themes like to include custom fonts like Font Awesome, which can add additional seconds to the load time of your page.
If you have a lot of display scripts on your site, you’ll generally find your site failing badly on PageSpeed Score. This is because ads scripts usually download a ton of external JS files, and as earlier explained, JS is render-blocking.
As earlier explained, WordPress speed optimization can be done by yourself if you have a strong technical background. There are literally tons of resources out there that talk about WordPress speed (and website speed in general). If you want to try doing WordPress speed optimization yourself, you just need to know how to solve the issues mentioned in the previous section.
But sometimes, getting past Google’s PageSpeed Score isn’t as straightforward as it looks. If you find yourself struggling to get anywhere after all the attempts in speed optimization, it’s time to hire seek help from speed experts who deal with WordPress speed daily.
That’s why you need a WordPress speed optimization service. They can help you improve your website speed and make you more money.
If you searched around Google, you’ll find that WordPress speed optimization services are sold at a wide range of price points, from $99 to $1000. And most of these require monthly subscriptions. Adding to the cost is the time required as some of those WordPress experts may take weeks to go through your entire site. This makes it challenging to find an optimization service that guarantees results and produces absolute results that won’t degrade over time.
My take on this is – WordPress speed optimization really doesn’t need to be expensive. There are already tons of free WordPress plugins out there that help with basic speed optimization. So in most cases, you really don’t need to pay more than $200 for WordPress Speed Optimization Services.
However, all being said, WordPress speed optimization is not an easy task either, especially if you want your WordPress site to load lightning fast and achieve the best PageSpeed Score possible.
That’s why I created ZippiSite an affordable WordPress Speed Optimization Service. I believe that all business owners should be able to get help with their website speed without breaking the bank.
At only $99, I will do WordPress Speed Optimization on your site (all published web pages) with the following guaranteed results:
And it only takes 48 hours for me to deliver! 🙂
When I work on your site, I don’t just do some basic speed optimization like installing cache plugins or image optimization. You can already do these yourself. Just do a search on Google!
Instead, I use proprietary tools to tackle issues flagged by Google PageSpeed. Such issues include “Remove Unused JS“, “Remove Unused CSS“, “Critical CSS” and “Remove Render-blocking Resources“.
And they don’t call me “WordPress Speed Fanatic” for no reason. I even developed my own WordPress plugins just because there are no reliable plugins on the market that would deal with “Unused CSS”.
When you purchase my WordPress Speed Optimization service, you are hiring someone who has been working on WordPress speed for the past 6 years, on a daily basis!
And I can’t stress this enough. If I can’t deliver the expected results, you get your money back!
Over the past 6 years, I have done speed optimization on more than 800 WordPress websites to make them load faster. In other words, you are getting help from someone who has seen almost every kind of WordPress website out there and has figured out how to speed them up. Experience does make a huge difference in this!
The beauty of my services is – the only thing you need to do is (perhaps) make the payment. I will take care of the rest. You don’t need to worry about anything else!
My price is very competitive when considering the quality of service you are getting. You can check out some of my speed optimization results.
If you are not happy with the result, I will continue working on it until you are satisfied or give you a full refund – your choice!
I have helped many business owners speed up their WordPress website and they are all very happy with the results. If you’re looking for an experienced WordPress Speed Optimization Service, look no further!
Wondering how I find the issues on your website? Well, here’s the behind-the-scenes of how I begin my WordPress Speed Optimization workflow.
A full website analysis using speed test tools like GTmetrix and PageSpeed Insights can quickly reveal all hidden issues that slow down a WordPress website.
Once your payment is confirmed, you’ll receive an email requesting your WordPress admin login credentials. After accessing your site, we begin a comprehensive speed audit and apply targeted optimizations.
Within 48 hours, we’ll improve your site’s performance to load in under 3 seconds, with a Google PageSpeed Mobile score of 80+. If we don’t meet these results, you’ll get a full refund guaranteed.
Yes, absolutely. We perform a full backup before making any changes. If something unexpected happens (which hasn’t occurred in over 800+ sites we’ve optimized), your site will be restored immediately — no damage, no stress.
No, your website will stay online and fully functional during the process. We apply improvements in a live, non-disruptive manner to ensure zero downtime.
Your site will look and function exactly the same after optimization. If there are any elements that might impact speed — such as third-party scripts or widgets — we’ll discuss options with you first and only proceed with your approval.
The optimization covers your entire website, not just the homepage. This includes all internal pages, blog posts, and WooCommerce product/category pages (if applicable).
We address all major issues flagged by Google, including:
Reducing unused CSS & JavaScript
Eliminating render-blocking resources
Optimizing image delivery and lazy loading
Minimizing main-thread work
Improving server response times
While a perfect 100 is often unrealistic for WordPress sites due to dynamic content, we typically achieve 80+ on mobile and 90+ on desktop, which significantly boosts user experience and SEO.
Yes; as long as you follow the post-optimization guidelines we’ll provide. We include a brief report showing the improvements made and simple tips to maintain high performance going forward.
