After you connect a large property inventory, your HomeRunner site can load slowly.
Why this happens. With a large catalog, most slowness comes from the server rebuilding heavy listing pages on every visit, not from the images.
What you can do. Work through these in order of impact:
- Turn on full-page caching. Without a page cache, every visitor triggers a fresh rebuild of your listing pages. A page cache builds the page once and serves the finished version to everyone after that. This is the single biggest speed-up. WP Rocket is recommended. Important: WP Rocket must be configured to work with the HomeRunner booking widget, or it can break the "check price" popups on your listings. Follow the setup guide for the exact settings: https://homerunner.io/docs/using-wp-rocket-with-homerunner-2/
- Enable object caching (Redis) if your host offers it. This speeds up the repeated database and inventory lookups a large catalog performs on each page build.
- Make sure your hosting can handle the catalog size. Several hundred listings is real weight. Entry-level or shared hosting plans can run out of headroom once a large inventory is connected. Managed WordPress hosting built for higher traffic (for example Cloudways or WP Engine) handles this load better.
- Optimize images. Enable lazy-loading so images only load as the visitor scrolls, and turn on automatic WebP conversion and compression (plugins such as Imagify or ShortPixel; WP Rocket also handles lazy-loading). This trims page weight once the caching and server side are handled.
Finding where the problem is. If a page takes many seconds before anything appears at all, the cause is likely server or caching (items 1 to 3). If the page structure appears quickly but images fill in slowly, the cause is likely images (item 4).