Once you have confirmed the server itself is lagging (see our diagnostic guide if you have not yet), here are the fixes that actually move the needle, roughly ordered from highest impact to more situational.
1. Switch to Paper if you haven't already
If you are still running vanilla or Spigot, moving to Paper is close to a free 30-50% TPS improvement with zero configuration changes, through async chunk loading and a long list of internal optimizations. This is the single highest-impact change available before touching any settings.
2. Lower view-distance and simulation-distance
Both default to 10 in server.properties. Dropping view-distance to 6-8 and simulation-distance to 4-6 meaningfully cuts the number of chunks kept loaded and actively simulated, reducing simulation-distance from 10 to 5 alone can cut entity processing by roughly 75%.
3. Apply proper JVM flags
The default Java startup flags are not tuned for Minecraft's memory allocation pattern. Aikar's flags tune the G1 garbage collector specifically for this, reducing GC-related stutters. See our dedicated GC lag guide for the details.
4. Tune entity activation range
Paper's paper-world-defaults.yml lets you control how far away an entity still receives full AI processing versus a cheaper reduced tick. Recommended starting points are roughly 24 blocks for monsters, 16 for animals, and 8 for miscellaneous entities, tune down further if entity lag persists.
5. Pre-generate chunks instead of letting players do it live
Generating new terrain in real time as players explore is one of the most common sources of stutter. Chunky pre-generates a defined area in the background ahead of time, so players never trigger live generation lag. See our chunk lag guide for more.
6. Find and fix the actual bottleneck with spark
If the above general fixes do not fully resolve it, spark profiling will name the specific plugin, mod, or system consuming the tick time, guessing at this point is much slower than just reading the report.
7. Right-size your RAM
More RAM is not automatically better, an oversized heap can increase garbage collection pause times. A RAM calculator gives a specific recommendation instead of guessing.
If nothing here fully fixes it
At that point the server may genuinely be undersized for its player count and world size. A server status tool is a good way to confirm current load, and Tick Hosting's plans (including a free tier) give you room to scale up cleanly. Get started on Tick Hosting's plans page.