Nine things that make WordPress faster on shared hosting
Ordered by payoff, not by novelty. If you only do the first three you will get most of the benefit.
1. Turn on page caching
Without caching, every visitor makes WordPress boot PHP, load your plugins, query the database and rebuild a page that has not changed since the last person asked for it. Page caching stores the finished HTML and serves it directly. On a typical site this is the difference between 800ms and 80ms, and it is one checkbox.
Exclude the cart, checkout and account pages, and anything showing a logged-in user their own data.
2. Remove plugins rather than optimising them
Every active plugin loads on every request, including the ones you tried once in 2023. Deactivating is not enough - delete them. Then look at what is left and ask whether a page builder, a slider plugin and a separate animation library are all earning their place. A theme with forty plugins is slow in a way no caching layer fully hides.
3. Fix your images
Images are usually the largest thing on the page by an order of magnitude. Three steps: serve WebP, size the file to the space it occupies rather than uploading a 4000px photo into a 600px slot, and set loading="lazy" on anything below the fold. WordPress does the last one for you now; the first two need a plugin or a habit.
4. Use a current PHP version
PHP 8.x is meaningfully faster than 7.x on the same code, and it is a dropdown in the control panel. Take a backup, switch, and click through the site - a plugin that has not been updated in three years is the usual thing that objects.
5. Let the browser cache your static files
Long cache headers on CSS, JavaScript, fonts and images mean a returning visitor downloads none of them again. This is a few lines in .htaccess and most caching plugins will write it for you.
6. Clean the database
Post revisions, expired transients, spam comments and orphaned metadata accumulate quietly. A site running for a few years can carry tens of thousands of rows nobody reads. Clean it, then check the tables your slowest queries touch actually have indexes.
7. Stop loading assets on pages that do not use them
A contact form plugin usually loads its CSS and JavaScript on every page of the site, including the ones with no form. Most good plugins have a setting for this; for the rest, a conditional dequeue in the theme does it.
8. Cut third-party scripts
Analytics, chat widgets, heatmaps, pixels and fonts all sit on somebody else's server, and your page waits for the slowest of them. Audit the list, drop what nobody looks at, and self-host your fonts.
9. Then, and only then, consider a bigger plan
If the site is still slow after the eight above, the constraint is genuinely resources and a VPS will help. Doing it the other way round means paying more for the same slow site, which is the most common way this goes wrong.
Our WordPress plans ship with server-level caching and NVMe storage already configured, so points 1 and part of 5 are done before you log in. The rest is your site, and worth an afternoon.
