WordPress Speed Optimisation Service

Your site is slow, you have probably already tried a caching plugin, and it did not fix it. Send me the URL and I will tell you why, for free.

Free quote

Give me your slowest URL and I will find out what your server is actually doing to build that page: which queries are slow and why, which plugins or theme functions are responsible, how much memory it burns and where the time goes.

You get a written summary of what I find and a fixed-price quote to fix it. No obligation, and no sales call unless you want one.

Who you are hiring

I am Dave Hilditch, and I was Head of Search Technology at Skyscanner. I solved the performance behind their browse views: searching without a destination, and searching a route without dates. Both mean answering a question with millions of possible answers, fast enough that it feels instant. I built their database architecture and the team around it, through two funding rounds.

Since 2016 I have been focused on solving and fixing WordPress and WooCommerce performance, and I have been coding since I was six. I gave the WordCamp Brighton talk on scaling WooCommerce to a million products back when the accepted wisdom was that WooCommerce fell over at five thousand.

Did you know?

Most speed tools grade the browser. They measure images, scripts and fonts, then tell you to minify something. If your pages are still slow after all that, the problem is page generation time on the server, and no amount of minification touches it.

No performance problem scares me

There has never been a performance problem I could not solve. Not one.

Some slow sites have an obvious cause and are fixed in an afternoon. Those are not the interesting ones, and they are not why people call me.

The jobs that end up on my desk are usually the ones somebody else has already given up on. A theme whose category template does something pathological that only shows up at scale. A plugin whose author will not fix it, so I rewrite the hot path myself. A query nobody can explain, in code nobody has read in years. Custom SQL, custom indexes, custom caching layers, rewritten theme functions, whatever the problem actually turns out to need.

I do not work from a checklist, because the problems that survive a checklist are exactly the ones you still have. I profile the site, follow the evidence, and read whatever code the evidence points at. If it is your theme, I fix your theme. If it is a third-party plugin, I fix that. If it is the database design, I change the database design.

Why this matters

An AI will name an index and write you a script. It cannot see your site, so it cannot know which of your thirty plugins is the one reading eighty thousand rows on your category page, and it will not take responsibility for running <code>ALTER TABLE</code> on a two-million-row table on your live store at four in the afternoon. Advice is free now. Knowing which advice applies to your site, and applying it safely, is what you are buying.

Everything I change is measured before and after, and you get the numbers rather than adjectives.

What I work on

Slow queries and missing indexes

Query plans read properly, indexes designed for your actual access patterns, and applied online so writes are never blocked.

Custom and third-party code

Plugin and theme code rewritten where it is the bottleneck, including code whose author has no intention of fixing it.

Theme performance

Category, search and archive templates that do far more work than they need to, rewritten so they scale with your catalogue.

Stack and configuration

Object caching, page caching, PHP and database tuning, and the hosting decisions that actually matter at your size.

Front-end performance

Render-blocking assets, oversized payloads and Core Web Vitals. Most sites arrive with a front-end symptom and a server-side cause, so both get fixed.

Capacity testing

How much traffic your site actually survives, found out deliberately rather than during your busiest hour. Load tested, then the ceiling raised.

Plugin optimisation

The plugins you cannot remove, made to behave. Profiled individually, then fixed at the source rather than worked around.

Scale, not just speed

Sites that fall over under traffic rather than being uniformly slow, which is a different problem with a different fix.

What I need from you

Your worst-performing URL

One specific page, not the home page. A category page, a product page, a search result or a wp-admin screen. The one that makes you wince. I will fix far more than that one page, but your worst URL is the fastest route to your biggest problems, and those problems are usually the same ones slowing down everything else.

What is wrong, in your own words

"Checkout takes eight seconds." "The admin product list times out." "It falls over when we run an import." Plain language is fine.

What you are running

WordPress or WooCommerce, roughly how many products or posts, your theme, and any performance plugins you already have.

Your host

Shared, VPS, managed WordPress, or your own server.

Access

wp-admin, ideally SSH, and preferably a staging copy rather than your live site.

Access, and why staging is preferred

I will need wp-admin access to do this properly. There is no way to profile what your server is doing from the outside, and anyone who tells you otherwise is reading a speed test rather than your site.

SSH access makes it considerably faster. It lets me read the slow query log, profile properly, work at the database directly rather than through a browser, read the actual configuration of your services rather than guessing at it, and measure things directly instead of inferring them from the outside.

My preference, and the safer option for you, is that you give me access to a staging copy of your site. I work there, prove the numbers, and we move the changes to live together once you have seen what they do. If you do not have staging, I can work with that too.

Who this is for

Best for

WooCommerce stores where uncached pages, cart and checkout are slow
Sites where wp-admin has become painful to work in
Catalogues past a few hundred thousand postmeta rows
Sites that fall over under traffic rather than being uniformly slow
Problems another developer has already looked at and failed to fix
Teams with a developer I can work alongside and hand over to

What people have said

Dave managed to achieve a full integration with my Woodmart e-commerce theme. On a store with thousands of products, product search is crucial, and speed is a precious asset. Previously, with Woodmart’s AJAX search, results took on average 2 to 3 seconds to load – now, thanks to Dave’s work, the search is instant.
Daelmir, August 2025

It dropped a product search from 45 sec+ to 2-3 sec in combination with Scalability Pro. This is used on a website with 3000 products and as much variation.
inkoop, September 2025

This plugin made the websites for my clients quite faster, something other “speed” plugins couldn’t do. If you need one “speed” plugin, it’s this one.
inkoop, September 2025, on Scalability Pro

Game changing plugin with fantastic and responsive support. Our operation is currently small in scope when compared to other sites powered by Super Speedy Search, however, we now have the confidence that we can continue to grow our catalog without destroying Woo’s performance.
John Koenig, March 2026

Frequently asked questions

How much does the analysis cost?

Nothing. You get the findings and a fixed-price quote whether or not you go ahead.

How much does the work cost?

It depends entirely on what I find, which is why the analysis comes first. You get a fixed price before anything starts, not an hourly rate that drifts.

Do you need access to my site?

Yes. I need wp-admin access, and SSH access makes it much faster. Access to a staging copy is my preference and the safer option for you.

Will you break my site?

Work happens on staging wherever possible. Database changes use online operations so writes are not blocked, every index is named so it can be removed precisely, and everything is reversible. Backups first, always.

Do you do front-end optimisation?

Yes. Render-blocking assets, oversized payloads and Core Web Vitals are all in scope. Most sites that come to me have a server-side problem underneath a front-end symptom, so I look at both.

My developer has already looked at this.

Good, that usually saves time. The problems that survive a competent developer are the ones worth my attention, and I would rather work alongside your team and hand the reasoning over than be needed again for the same thing.

Can you work with my developer?

Preferably. The work comes with the reasoning so your team can maintain it afterwards.

What if a plugin fixes it?

Then buy the plugin. I will tell you which one and why.

Get your free analysis

Send your worst URL, what is wrong, what you are running and who hosts it.