Speed is no longer a luxury. It’s a necessity. If your website takes too long to load, people will leave before they even see what you offer. We see it all the time — beautiful sites, great businesses, but slow pages that ruin the experience and hurt results.
So let’s fix that.
In this guide, we’re walking you through how we optimize WordPress websites to load faster — for free — using a tool that works even if you’re not using premium hosting. And we’re not just talking theory. These are real steps we’ve used to bring sites from sluggish to blazing fast in minutes.
Step 1: Measure Your Current Speed
Before optimizing anything, it’s smart to check your baseline. Open your site in Chrome, right-click, and choose “Inspect.” Head to the Network tab, reload the page, and take note of the “Finish” time.
Let’s say your homepage is loading in 1.2 seconds. That’s already not bad — but we can cut that down significantly.
Step 2: Install a Free Optimization Plugin
We recommend SiteGround Optimizer. It’s a free plugin that works even if your hosting isn’t with SiteGround. And it does a lot.
To install it:
- Go to your WordPress dashboard
- Plugins → Add New
- Search “SiteGround Optimizer”
- Click Install, then Activate
Right out of the box, it will enable basic caching and start speeding up your site. But we’re going deeper.
Step 3: Activate Caching Settings
Caching is one of the biggest upgrades you can make. Without caching, WordPress has to run a full process for every page load — pull from the database, run PHP scripts, and generate the page dynamically.
With caching, your site generates a static HTML file once and shows that version to everyone. The difference? It’s 5 to 10 times faster.
Here’s how to configure it:
- Go to SiteGround Optimizer → Caching
- Enable File-Based Caching
- If your hosting supports it, also turn on Memcached (great for database performance)
- Exclude pages that shouldn’t be cached, like
/checkout,/my-account, or anything with dynamic content
Reload your site in the inspector, and you’ll already see load time drop — potentially under 200ms. That’s Google’s happy zone.
Step 4: Enable Environment Optimizations
Still in SiteGround Optimizer, head over to the Environment tab.
Turn on the following:
- Force HTTPS — make sure every visitor gets the secure version of your site
- Fix Insecure Content — to avoid broken padlock icons
- WordPress Heartbeat Optimization — reduces background server load, especially in the dashboard
That alone will make your backend faster and lower CPU usage if you’re on shared hosting.
Step 5: Minify and Combine Your Code (CSS & JavaScript)
This part gets technical, but the plugin makes it simple.
Go to Frontend Optimization and enable:
- Minify CSS
- Combine CSS files
- Preload Combined CSS
- Minify JavaScript
- Defer Render-blocking JS
After each change, test your site. Browse a few pages. If something breaks (like layout or sliders), you can toggle individual settings off again. But most of the time, it just works — and you’ll notice a major speed gain.
Also enable:
- Minify HTML
- Web Font Optimization
- Remove Query Strings
These are small tweaks, but together they matter.
Step 6: Compress and Optimize Your Images
Heavy images are the #1 cause of slow websites. Luckily, the plugin also handles this.
In the Media section:
- Set compression to around 60 (it balances quality and speed)
- Enable WebP format (modern browsers love it)
- Enable Lazy Load — so images only load when users scroll to them
- Set a max image width (we use 1920px) to prevent people from uploading billboard-sized files
This step alone can cut your page size by 60–80%.
Step 7: Retest — and Be Amazed
Open Chrome Inspector again, reload your site, and look at the results.
In our case? The load time went from 1.22 seconds down to 149 milliseconds.
We also tested using Pingdom:
- Performance grade: 99
- Load time: 0.22 seconds
- Page size: 52KB
- Requests: 7
That’s world-class. And all of it with a free plugin and smart setup.