I get asked to speed up WordPress sites a lot, and after a few dozen of them I stopped being surprised. The causes are almost always the same five things. The order matters, though, because fixing the wrong one first wastes an afternoon. Here is the sequence I actually follow.

1. Measure before touching anything

Run PageSpeed Insights on the home page and on the slowest template, which is usually a blog post or a product page. Write down LCP, CLS and INP. Take a screenshot. Clients like seeing the before and after, and so will you when something you changed makes it worse.

2. Find the LCP element

Nine times out of ten the largest contentful paint is a hero image or a heading that is waiting on a web font. For the image: serve it as WebP, size it to the container, and give it fetchpriority="high" with no lazy loading. For the font: preload the one file the heading needs and use font-display: swap. On one client site this alone took mobile LCP from 4.1 seconds to 2.3.

3. Sort out caching, then stop

On LiteSpeed hosting, use LiteSpeed Cache and turn on the object cache. Anywhere else, WP Rocket does the job. What you should not do is run two caching plugins at once. Every “the site broke after we optimised it” ticket I have seen in the last year came from stacked caching plugins fighting over the same files.

4. Hunt down layout shift

Every image needs width and height attributes. Inline SVGs that load late need a reserved box. If a cookie banner pushes the page down when it appears, that counts as shift too, and it is one of the more common causes I see. Chrome DevTools has a layout shift overlay under Rendering that shows you exactly which element jumped.

5. Delay the scripts nobody needs yet

Chat widgets, pixels, Tag Manager, review badges. None of them need to run before the visitor has even seen the page. Most caching plugins can delay them until first interaction. Then go through your plugin list and ask, for each script, whether it is used on this page. A slider plugin that loads on every page but is only used on the home page is a free win.

One last thing

Speed is not something you fix once. Plugins update, someone uploads a 6 MB PNG, a new tracking tag gets added. I re-run the audit after every major change on the sites I look after, and I would suggest you do the same. If you want me to look at yours, the contact details are at the bottom of the page.