Is WordPress slow for contractor websites?

WordPress is not slow. The way most contractor sites are built on it is: a purchased theme that ships every feature it has, a drag-and-drop page builder on top, fifteen plugins, and full-size photos. Each layer adds code the phone must download and run before it can draw your headline.

Strip the layers and WordPress can be quick; most owners never get the chance, because the person who built it has moved on.

Where the seconds go

• The theme. Multi-purpose themes are sold on demos with sliders, portfolios, shops and animations. All of that loads on your page whether you use it or not.
• The page builder. Elementor, Divi, WPBakery and the like let a non-developer lay out a page, and pay for it with large scripts and styles on every load. The builder is the single biggest cause of slow WordPress contractor sites we audit.
• Plugins. A form, a review feed, a slider, a chat bubble, two SEO plugins, a cache plugin to fix the others. Each is a request or ten.
• Images. Camera-size photos in a 390-pixel column. See the speed guide.
• Hosting. Shared hosting adds a second or two of server time on a busy day. Usually the smallest piece.

Can it be fixed in place?

Sometimes. Resizing images, removing dead plugins, a decent cache and a better host can take a 7-second WordPress site to 4. Getting under Google's 2.5-second line on a builder theme is rare, because the builder's own code is the floor. That is why our rebuilds are not WordPress: they are plain, hand-written pages with the styles inside them, one font and no plugin layer, which is how the demo sites land under a second on the phone test. Check one with the 60-second test.

What you lose by leaving WordPress

The admin screen where you edited pages yourself, and the plugin ecosystem. In our experience most contractors edited the site twice a year and the plugins were the problem. Edits go through us and are included in the fee; and you own the code either way, as the ownership answer explains.