FacetWP itself is very fast. It normally takes a fraction of a second to load results. However, every WordPress request (including AJAX) is only as fast as the slowest plugin.

The AJAX requests that FacetWP uses on pages with filters are ignored by most caching plugins, so the load time you’re seeing with FacetWP is your server’s and website’s true speed.

If FacetWP takes a while to load, there’s likely a larger underlying issue. Make sure to disable any unnecessary plugins, and ensure that your server has sufficient resources.

You can read more about the possible causes of slow filtering, and FacetWP’s speed and limitations when indexing, filtering and searching in our performance article, which also lists things you can do to speed up the filtering process itself.

If you want to increase the (true, uncached) loading speed of you pages, check out our tutorial about how to use Query Monitor to optimize performance by optimizing your database queries.

And see our guide on how to make your website load faster for an overview to get you started with increasing server and website performance.

We also have a free Caching add-on that caches FacetWP’s AJAX requests, which may help on high-traffic sites.

See also