How to speed up a slow website (the basics checklist)

A slow website costs you customers - Google research shows that 53% of visitors leave a mobile page that takes more than 3 seconds to load. Before paying for any speed plugin or upgrading your hosting plan, work through this free checklist - most South African business sites can shave 60% off their load time without spending a cent.

The 8-step speed checklist

1. Measure first. Run your site through Google PageSpeed Insights. Note the Core Web Vitals scores - they tell you what to fix.
2. Compress your images. Almost every slow page has un-compressed images. Use TinyPNG to shrink JPGs and PNGs by 60-80% with no visible quality loss. Convert to WebP where possible.
3. Pick the right image dimensions. Do not upload a 4000x3000 photo to display at 800x600. Resize before upload.
4. Enable caching. WordPress: install LiteSpeed Cache (free, included on Trinico Cloud hosting because we run LiteSpeed servers). Custom site: add cache headers in .htaccess.
5. Lazy-load below-the-fold images. Modern browsers do this with loading="lazy". WordPress does it automatically since version 5.5.
6. Minimise plugins. Each WordPress plugin adds load time. Audit yours - delete anything you do not actively use. Especially page builders and security suites that load on every page.
7. Use the right PHP version. PHP 8.2 is roughly 25% faster than PHP 7.4. See How to switch PHP version .
8. Host in South Africa. A site hosted in Europe or the US adds 150 to 250 ms to every request from a SA visitor. Local hosting is the single biggest speed boost for SA-targeted sites.

Advanced (when the basics are not enough)

• Add a CDN like Cloudflare or BunnyCDN to cache static assets at edge locations close to your visitors.
• Move to a cloud server if your shared hosting is hitting CPU/RAM limits.
• Database optimisation - clean up old revisions, transients and spam comments. WP-Optimize plugin does this safely.

Fast SA hosting (LiteSpeed) Bigger boost? Try a cloud server