Most WordPress sites score under 50 in PageSpeed Insights — and most owners have no idea. If your site feels slow, fails Core Web Vitals, or sits in the red, I fix it: a senior developer doing real engineering work, not a £25 plugin install. Fixed price from £350, no design changes, measurable before-and-after results. It starts with a free speed audit — your scores, the root causes, and an honest answer about what's achievable, within one business day.
The Cost of Slow
Speed isn't a nice-to-have — it's a direct line between your website and your revenue. A slow WordPress site loses on three fronts at once: Google uses Core Web Vitals as a ranking signal, so you rank lower; visitors leave before the page finishes; and the ones who stay convert at a lower rate. Three compounding losses, one fixable problem.
For a site doing £10k a month, one extra second of load time is roughly £700 a month gone — from speed alone.
The Diagnosis
You've probably Googled it and found plugin lists. Here's what a developer looks for instead — the six root causes behind almost every slow WordPress site.
The single most common cause. A 3MB photo uploaded straight from a camera destroys load time — and images typically account for 50–80% of total page weight. WebP conversion, compression, lazy loading, and proper sizing fix it.
Every active plugin adds load, and one badly written plugin running slow database queries can drag the whole site down. Stacking a caching plugin on top doesn't fix a broken plugin underneath — it just hides it.
No amount of optimisation outruns a server that takes two seconds to respond. If your TTFB is high, the problem is infrastructure — and sometimes the honest answer is “you need better hosting”. I'll tell you when it is.
Elementor, Divi, and heavyweight multipurpose themes load enormous amounts of CSS and render-blocking JavaScript — even on simple pages that use none of it. The “optional” features usually load everywhere.
Years of post revisions, transients, spam comments, and orphaned metadata pile up in the WordPress database and slow every single query. A proper cleanup makes a measurable difference.
Page caching, object caching, browser caching, CDN — configured correctly, they eliminate repeated work for every returning visitor. Configured badly, they can make things worse. Getting it right matters.
Speed is a whole-system problem. A site with perfect images on terrible hosting is still slow — so I audit the full picture and fix the actual root causes, in priority order.
And when the audit shows hosting itself is the bottleneck, I'll say so plainly — the honest fix is a move, not more optimisation. That's covered by my WordPress migration service and managed hosting.
What You Get
Every job starts with the audit, so the work targets your actual problems rather than a generic checklist. The standard optimisation covers:
I don't promise a magic number — some hosting is so poor that even perfect optimisation can't reach 90+, and I'll tell you in the audit if that's you. What I do guarantee: your scores improve measurably, or the work is free.
Your design, UX, and content stay exactly as they are. The site looks identical — it just loads significantly faster.
Process
Send me your URL. I run the full diagnosis — PageSpeed Insights scores for mobile and desktop, Core Web Vitals status, TTFB, plugin impact — and send you a written summary within one business day. You keep the findings either way.
The audit sets the scope; the scope sets the price. You know exactly what the work costs and what improvement is realistically achievable before you commit a penny. No hourly billing, no surprises.
Typically 2–5 days with temporary admin access. I work methodically through the root causes — images, caching, database, code, CDN — testing each stage against real PageSpeed measurements as I go.
You get the before/after scores, a summary of everything done, and plain-English documentation. If anything outside scope would benefit from attention, I'll flag it honestly — not upsell it.
Investment
The audit tells me the scope; the scope sets the price — agreed before any work starts. No hourly billing.
WooCommerce stores are priced separately because cart, checkout, and product pages need targeted work beyond standard optimisation. Payment by card, Stripe, or bank transfer.
Fair Question
Speed optimisation on Fiverr starts at £25. Most of it is the same job: install a caching plugin, switch on a few settings, done. If your site's problems happen to match those settings, you got lucky. If not, you've spent £25 and nothing meaningfully changed.
The difference is diagnosis. A plugin is not an analyst — it can't spot the form plugin hammering your database, the 400KB of JavaScript nothing uses, or the hosting that makes every other fix pointless. I'm a senior developer with twenty-plus years in production systems: I audit first, fix root causes, and document everything so you understand what was done and why.
If all your site needs is a plugin tweak, I'll tell you — and you can do it yourself for nothing. If it needs real engineering, that's what you're getting.
Questions
The ones every speed job starts with. Anything else — ask, and you'll get a straight answer within a business day.
Nothing visible changes. Your site will look exactly as it does now — all the work is under the bonnet: code, caching, images, database, configuration. Design, content, and functionality stay completely intact. That's a promise worth more than any score.
The honest answer depends on your site and your hosting. Most standard WordPress sites on decent hosting reach 85–95 after proper optimisation. Sites on slow shared hosting are hard to push past 80 without a hosting change — and the free audit tells you exactly which camp you're in before you spend anything.
Yes — and it's priced as its own service, because cart, checkout, and product pages have performance characteristics that standard WordPress pages don't. Slow checkouts cost real revenue, so they get targeted, careful work rather than a generic pass.
Usually, yes. Most general optimisation work amounts to installing a caching plugin and compressing some images. There's typically significant improvement still available — particularly in Core Web Vitals (LCP, INP, CLS), which need specific engineering fixes that go beyond caching. I also build and maintain WordPress sites full-time, so I know where the bodies are buried.
Temporary WordPress admin access for the work itself, and Cloudflare access if you already use it. I don't need hosting or FTP access for most sites — though server-level access helps if TTFB work is in scope. Everything is removed or changed back once the job's done.
Send me your site's URL. Within one business day you'll have the full picture — PageSpeed Insights scores for mobile and desktop, Core Web Vitals status, TTFB, plugin impact — and an honest answer about what's achievable. If meaningful improvement is possible, you'll get a fixed-price quote. If your site's already well-optimised, I'll tell you that too, and it costs you nothing.
Fixed price No design changes Before/after scores documented