Affiliate sites are unusually sensitive to page speed for two separate reasons: it's a ranking factor, and a slow product page directly loses conversions — a visitor who was ready to click "Buy on Amazon" doesn't wait around for a page that takes 4 seconds to load. Here's what actually moves the number, roughly in order of effort-to-payoff.

The usual fixes, in order

  1. Image optimization. Product images are almost always the biggest weight on an affiliate page. Serve modern formats (WebP/AVIF), lazy-load anything below the fold, and — specific to Amazon affiliate sites — hotlink product images rather than downloading full-resolution copies into your media library where they're served unoptimized.
  2. A real caching layer. Page caching plus a CDN handles most of the remaining server-response-time problem for a typical WordPress install, and it's usually the highest payoff-per-hour fix available.
  3. Plugin audit. Every plugin that hooks into the page load adds cost, and affiliate sites accumulate a lot of them — link cloakers, ad networks, SEO suites, page builders. Remove anything not earning its weight.
  4. Database and hosting. If you're still slow after the above, the bottleneck is usually shared hosting under real traffic load or an unoptimized database — either upgrade hosting tiers or move to something built for WordPress specifically.

The option most sites never consider: going static

Every fix above is still optimizing a dynamic site — WordPress builds every page from a database query and PHP execution on each request, no matter how well-cached. The more drastic option is removing that step for most pages entirely: exporting the site to static HTML and serving it from a CDN edge network, where there's no PHP execution and no database query standing between the request and the response.

The reason most sites don't do this isn't that it's hard to export — several plugins do that part — it's that going static naively breaks anything dynamic: comments stop working, search stops working, contact forms stop working, and a WooCommerce storefront's live prices and cart go with them.

What makes static viable for a site that still needs dynamic features

The fix is proxying, not abandoning dynamic features: serve everything static by default, and quietly route the handful of requests that need to hit real WordPress — a comment submission, a search query, a WooCommerce price check — back to your live backend. Visitors never notice the difference; the site just gets dramatically faster for the 95%+ of traffic that's reading a page, not submitting a form.

This is specifically what Pinery Static is built around — see our migration guide for the practical steps, or the comparison against Simply Static if you're weighing static-export tools generally.