Why is my website slow, and what to do about it

Measure before you change anything

Test from Bangladesh, not from a US-based speed tool. A page that scores well from Virginia can still take 6 seconds in Dhaka. Use a testing service with a Singapore or Indian node, which is the closest realistic proxy for local traffic.

Note two different numbers:

• TTFB (time to first byte) — how long the server took to think. High TTFB is a server or application problem.
• Fully loaded — how long everything took to arrive. High here with a low TTFB is an images and scripts problem.

If TTFB is high

• Enable LiteSpeed Cache (or the cache plugin for your platform). This alone routinely takes 2s down to 200ms.
• Check for a plugin doing external API calls on every page load.
• Look at cPanel → Resource Usage. If you are hitting the entry-process or CPU limit, the fix is a bigger plan, not more tuning.
• Check your database for a table with tens of thousands of rows of expired transients or spam comments.

If the page is fully loaded slowly

• Images are almost always the problem. Serve WebP, and never upload a 4000px photo to display it at 400px.
• Enable Brotli or gzip compression (on by default on our servers).
• Remove plugins that load their scripts on every page when they are only used on one.
• Combine and defer render-blocking JavaScript.

Things that will not help

• Buying a bigger plan when the site is slow because of an unoptimised 8 MB hero image.
• Adding a second caching plugin. Two caches usually fight.
• A CDN, if your audience is entirely in Bangladesh and your server is already in Dhaka.

When to move to a VPS

When Resource Usage shows you regularly hitting the CPU or entry-process ceiling — not before. Traffic alone is not a reason; resource limits are.