At Azuro Digital, we spend every week shaving milliseconds off client sites and boosting Core Web Vitals scores.
Fast loading speed does far more than impress developers – it lifts organic rankings, conversion rates and brand reputations.
Let’s dig into the top tactics that make WordPress sites blazing fast:
1. Use a High-Speed Hosting Platform Like Cloudflare Enterprise
Your choice of web host plays a huge role in how fast your website loads. There are many hosting companies that deliver slow load times – especially if you’re searching for something cheap.
It’s helpful to do extensive research on which WordPress hosting companies produce the best results. You can find several research studies online or you can even do your own testing.
At Azuro Digital, we’ve tested numerous WordPress hosting providers and we’ve come to the conclusion that Cloudflare Enterprise offers the best loading speed along with great security and reliability, but there are plenty of other good options such as Kinsta and WP Engine. Our hosting plans use Cloudflare Enterprise servers, and we conduct routine maintenance on your server to eliminate any technical upkeep from your end.
2. Integrate Your Website With a CDN (Content Delivery Network)
A CDN allows your website to load quickly across the globe, no matter where the user is accessing it from. It’s a network of many servers around the world, and it loads your website from the nearest server based on the user’s location (IP address).
If you don’t integrate a CDN, your website might load quickly for users that are near the primary server location, but it would load slower for users that are farther away. For that reason, it’s essential to use a CDN so your website loads quickly regardless of the user’s location – especially if your company serves a large geographical area.
If your site is hosted on Cloudflare Enterprise, then the CDN is already integrated. If you’re using a different host, keep in mind that many hosting providers don’t offer built-in CDN functionality. This means that you’ll need to integrate a CDN separately. But don’t worry – you don’t need to host with Cloudflare to leverage their CDN – you can integrate their CDN separately.
In addition to site speed, Cloudflare’s CDN also provides extra security benefits for your website!
3. Choose a Lightweight Theme
Your choice of theme for your WordPress application has considerable impacts on your site speed.
To clarify, your WordPress theme isn’t the “style” of your website – it’s the technical foundation (although some themes also offer templates for design).
You want your theme to have clean code and be free of any unnecessary bloat.
Some examples of lightweight themes include GeneratePress, Hello and Kadence.
4. Add a Site Speed Plugin Like WP Rocket
Using a site speed plugin that adds all of the extra bells-and-whistles is essential if you want to maximize your site speed on WordPress.
We recommend WP Rocket – the most popular site speed plugin on WordPress. It contains the critical features for site speed – such as caching, JS/CSS minification, lazy loading and more.
5. Compress and Resize Images with Imagify
Imagify is another site speed plugin owned by WP Rocket. It automatically compresses and resizes your images and serves them in WebP format so that your images don’t harm your loading speed. Use this plugin in combination with WP Rocket for the best results.
6. Keep an Eye on DOM Size (Use Your Page Builder Carefully)
DOM stands for “Document Object Model”, and DOM size refers to the number of HTML elements (nodes) on a webpage – which is an important factor for site speed.
Whether you’re using Gutenberg, Elementor, Bricks, Divi or any other page builder plugin, you need to learn the ins-and-outs of how to use it in a way that minimizes your website’s DOM size.
For example, if you’re using Elementor as your page builder, here’s a guide to reduce your DOM size.
7. Avoid Harmful or Excessive Plugins
It might be tempting to add another plugin to achieve something quickly, but this kind of laziness can be costly when it comes to your site speed.
For example, let’s say you’re looking to design a complex section or add some new functionality. There’s a good chance that it’s possible to get it done with the native features within your page builder, but it might be a little complicated or time consuming to implement. So instead of going down that road, you did some research and found a plugin that does it all without any extensive setup process.
That all sounds great… until your website ends up loading slowly. This might happen due to the plugin’s poor compatibility with your theme, page builder or other plugins, or simply because it’s a low-quality plugin that doesn’t prioritize speed issues. It could also be because you’ve added too many plugins to your site.
If it’s absolutely necessary to add an extra plugin, be sure to run it through the WP Hive scanner – a tool that audits the quality of plugins and lets you know whether it’s likely to harm site speed.
8. Keep Your Tech Stack Up to Date
Your PHP version, WordPress core, theme and plugins all need to be updated regularly (at least monthly).
If you don’t update your software, your website will eventually start to run slowly or break down altogether.
But we don’t recommend enabling auto-updates, because sometimes there can be issues with a new update. It’s important to have someone manually update your software on a staging server, double check that there aren’t any issues and then push the updates to the live site. This is something that we handle for most of our clients (learn more about our web hosting and maintenance service).
Final Thoughts
In 2025, users expect near-instant load time and Google’s search engine measures it. By combining the tips in this article, you can hit green Core Web Vitals without sacrificing WordPress’s flexibility.
Need a hand auditing your site or implementing these steps? Reach out to our team – we turn slow WordPress installs into revenue generators every day!
