Keeping Your Site Fast: Performance and Optimization

Overview

A fast site keeps visitors and ranks better. StretchWP gives you two things that work together: a live performance reading on the Health tab, and managed optimization plugins — the StretchWP Optimizer (caching and performance) and Scrunch (image optimization) — that ship with every managed site. This guide shows how to read your site's speed and get the most from those tools.

Read your site's speed

1. Open the site and select the Health tab.
2. Look at Response time — the round-trip time in milliseconds for the platform's probe of your public hostname.
- Under ~500 ms is snappy.
- 500–1,200 ms is acceptable but worth watching.
- Consistently over ~1,500 ms means pages feel slow and it's worth investigating.
3. Use Refresh (when shown) to take a fresh reading after making a change, so you can see the before/after.

Because the probe measures the real public hostname, the number reflects what an actual visitor experiences.

Get the most from the optimization plugins

StretchWP's managed suite includes two performance-focused plugins that are installed and updated for you:

• Optimizer — page caching, asset minification, and general performance tuning. With caching in place, repeat visits and shared pages serve much faster.
• Scrunch — automatic image optimization. Large, uncompressed images are the single most common cause of slow WordPress pages; Scrunch compresses and right-sizes them so your media stays sharp but light.

Because these are part of the managed suite, you don't install or update them yourself — they arrive as signed packages (see Managed plugin updates and the StretchWP plugin suite). Confirm they're present and active on the Plugins tab.

Steps: a simple speed pass

1. Baseline it. Open Health, note the current response time, and refresh once or twice to get a stable figure.
2. Confirm the optimizers are active. On the Plugins tab, check that the Optimizer and Scrunch plugins are present and active.
3. Trim heavy media in wp-admin. Log in with one click and replace oversized hero images or background videos with appropriately sized versions; let Scrunch handle compression on upload.
4. Re-measure. Return to Health, refresh the probe, and compare the response time to your baseline.
5. Escalate if it's still slow. If response time stays high after trimming media and confirming caching, note the figures and contact the Stretch team.

Example

A gallery site feels sluggish. On Health, response time reads 1,900 ms. The owner logs in, finds the homepage loads a 12 MB uncompressed banner, and replaces it with a properly sized image. On the next upload Scrunch compresses it automatically. Back on Health, a refreshed probe reads 640 ms — a night-and-day improvement the owner can point to.

Tips

• Images first. Oversized media is the most common and most fixable cause of slow WordPress pages.
• Measure, change, measure. Always take a Health reading before and after a change so you know whether it helped.
• Caching means changes can look delayed. After a big edit, a cached page may serve the old version briefly. Give it a moment, or ask the Stretch team to clear the cache if a change must appear immediately.
• A 200 with a high response time is a performance problem, not an outage. The site is up; it's just slow. That's the case to optimize rather than escalate as downtime.

Troubleshooting

• Response time spiked suddenly. Check the Plugins tab for a recently changed plugin and the Events tab for recent activity; a new or updated plugin can add load. Include both in any support request.
• A change isn't showing on the live site. Caching may be serving a stored copy. Wait briefly, or ask the Stretch team to clear the cache.
• The optimizers aren't listed on Plugins. The inventory may not have reported yet — give a newly provisioned site a few minutes and refresh. If they're still missing on an established site, flag it to the Stretch team.