I've shipped a lot of WordPress sites. The ones that stay fast a year later all have one thing in common: discipline about what goes into them.

Start with a lean theme

A page builder is convenient until your homepage ships 1.2 MB of CSS. I prefer a lightweight starter theme and a handful of well-scoped custom blocks. You write a little more code up front and save yourself a mountain of cleanup later.

Audit every plugin

Each plugin is a dependency you've signed up to maintain. Before installing one, I ask:

  1. Could this be 20 lines in functions.php instead?
  2. Does it load assets on every page, or only where needed?
  3. Is it actively maintained?

Cache aggressively

Full-page caching plus a CDN turns a dynamic CMS into something that behaves like a static site for 99% of visitors. Pair that with properly sized, lazy-loaded images and you're most of the way to a green Lighthouse score.

WordPress isn't the problem. Treating it like a junk drawer is.