Website speed can be improved from two sides: the website itself and the server it runs on.
Before changing anything, I would test the site with tools like PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix or WebPageTest. That helps you see whether the problem is images, JavaScript, caching, database queries, server response time or server resources.
Some website-level things to check:
- Enable page caching
- Use browser caching
- Compress and resize images
- Remove unused plugins or scripts
- Minify CSS and JavaScript
- Use a lightweight theme
- Keep PHP, CMS, themes and plugins updated
- Use a CDN if visitors are from different locations
- Optimise the database
- Check slow queries
- Enable Gzip or Brotli compression
On the server side, check:
- CPU usage
- RAM usage
- Disk I/O
- PHP version
- PHP memory limit
- Web server configuration
- Database performance
- Cache configuration
- Whether the server is overloaded
If you are using WordPress, caching and image optimisation usually make the biggest difference. A site with lots of plugins, large images and no caching can be slow even on a decent server.
If you have root access, you can also look at server-side caching, PHP-FPM tuning, database tuning, Redis/Object Cache, Nginx or Apache configuration and log analysis. But make changes carefully and test after each step.
If the current server is consistently hitting CPU, RAM or disk I/O limits, then optimisation alone may not be enough. At that point, moving to a VPS with root access can give you more control over the stack and performance tuning:
https://websitehosts.uk/vps-hosting-uk
My advice would be to optimise in this order:
- Test the site first
- Fix images and caching
- Remove unnecessary plugins/scripts
- Optimise database and PHP settings
- Check server resource usage
- Tune the server if you have root access
- Upgrade only if the server is actually the bottleneck
Do not guess. Measure first, fix the biggest bottleneck, then test again.