We offer a free WordPress speed audit, and people reasonably ask what that involves. No dark art, no 40-page PDF of waffle — here's exactly what gets checked, what the numbers mean, and what you should expect from anyone offering one.
Step 1 — Baseline numbers, both kinds
Core Web Vitals get measured two ways, because they answer different questions:
- Lab data — a controlled test on a clean cache. What your site is capable of, and the repeatable before/after benchmark.
- Field data — what real visitors on real phones actually experienced over the last 28 days. What your site is actually doing to people.
The three metrics, with "good" thresholds: Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds (how fast the main content appears), Interaction to Next Paint under 200ms (how fast it responds to a tap), Cumulative Layout Shift under 0.1 (how much it jumps around while loading). Plus the supporting cast: time to first byte, page weight, request count.
If the numbers are already good, you should be told so — and left alone. We're not going to invent work.
Step 2 — Reading the waterfall
The request waterfall tells the truth the homepage doesn't:
- Long green bar on the first request — the server is slow before anything else happens. That's a hosting problem (see why hosts are usually the culprit).
- Stacked CSS and JavaScript — render-blocking resources holding up first paint.
- Oversized images — a 4MB hero where 150KB belongs; the single biggest win on most small-business sites.
- Fonts doing a little dance — invisible text while three font files load. Usually fixed by self-hosting and
font-display: swap. - Third-party scripts — chat widgets, trackers, embeds. We once measured a social-share plugin costing 800ms on a site with nothing shareable.
Step 3 — Plugin bloat, measured not guessed
WordPress sites accumulate plugins the way sheds accumulate "useful" cables. A proper audit measures each plugin's actual cost — PHP time, database queries, scripts loaded on pages that never use them — and turns removal into a ranked list instead of a guessing game.
Step 4 — The hosting check
Server response on cached and uncached pages (the gap reveals how good the caching really is), PHP version, object cache presence, database health. If hosting is the bottleneck — on budget hosting, it usually is — the audit shows the before/after you can expect on a tuned stack.
What you should get at the end
A short report in plain English: your numbers, the three or four things actually worth fixing, ranked by impact versus effort — and what it would cost if you want someone else to do the work. No obligation, no follow-up pestering. Ask for the once-over here — and if you're more of a DIY type, our managed hosting explainer covers the stack changes that move the needle most.
