WordPress is not slow. WordPress with twenty-eight plugins, a page builder, four font families and unoptimised hero images is slow. Here is the order we work in when a client hands us a site scoring 34 on mobile.
1. Audit the plugin list first
Before touching code, list every plugin and what it does. On the last five sites we took over, an average of six plugins were either duplicating a feature or serving a page nobody visited. Deleting code is the cheapest performance work there is.
2. Fix the largest contentful paint element
Find it, then serve it properly: correctly sized, in a modern format, preloaded, and never lazy-loaded. A hero image that is 2,400px wide on a 390px phone is the single most common cause of a failing score.
3. Ship less CSS and JavaScript
Page builders load their whole framework on every page. If the site can move to native blocks or a light custom theme, that alone often halves total blocking time.
4. Self-host fonts and subset them
Two weights of one family, subset to Latin, preloaded, with a metric-compatible fallback so text does not shift when the font arrives.
5. Cache at the edge
Full-page caching plus a CDN in front of it. Get this wrong on a logged-in or e-commerce site and you will serve one customer another customer’s cart, so exclude those routes deliberately.
6. Set a budget and enforce it in review
Performance is not a task you finish, it is a constraint you keep. We agree a Lighthouse floor with the client and treat dropping below it as a bug, not a nice-to-have.
None of this is exotic. It is just unglamorous work done in the right order, and it is why a well-built WordPress site can still beat a fashionable framework on a mid-range phone.