Performance and standards
Website speed optimisation
What it is
Speed work is measurement first. A PageSpeed score is not the target. Largest Contentful Paint, Interaction to Next Paint and Cumulative Layout Shift are, because those are what Google records from actual visitors.
Most slow sites are slow for two or three reasons — usually oversized images, a page builder, and a stack of plugins loading on every page. Establishing which is the job.
We tell you the ceiling before you spend anything. Some sites cannot be made fast without being rebuilt, and that is worth knowing at the start.
Who it is for
- Sites failing Core Web Vitals in Search Console.
- Shops where the product pages take long enough that people leave.
- Sites that were quick at launch and are not any more.
- Anyone paying for traffic that arrives before the page does.
What is included
- Field data from Search Console, not only a lab score
- LCP, INP and CLS measured on mobile as well as desktop
- Images converted and sized to what the page actually uses
- Script and plugin audit, with things removed rather than deferred
- Caching and CDN configured properly
- Before-and-after figures from the same tool on the same pages
What is not
- Guaranteeing a particular score. Anybody who does is guessing.
- Removing functionality to win a metric. If a script pays for itself, it stays.
- Fixing slow hosting. If the server is the bottleneck, the fix is to move, and that is migration.
How it runs
4 steps, in this order.
01
Measure
Field data first — what real visitors experienced over the last twenty-eight days. Lab tools come second, because they test one device on a good connection in a data centre.
02
Diagnose
A request waterfall per template. Homepage, a service page, a product page. They almost always fail for different reasons.
03
Fix
In order of impact. Images and fonts before micro-optimisations, every time, because that is where the seconds are.
04
Re-measure
Same tool, same pages, same conditions. Field data takes twenty-eight days to catch up and we say so rather than showing you a lab number and calling it a result.
Price
Quoted
Quoted after the measurement step, which happens first so that both of us know what is achievable. Sites hosted with us get the caching and the CDN as standard.
Questions people actually ask
Will I get a green PageSpeed score?
Possibly. It is a lab simulation of one mid-range phone. We optimise for the field data Google actually uses, and the two numbers do not always agree.
Does speed affect my rankings?
It is a ranking signal and a small one next to content and links. It affects conversion considerably more than it affects position.
My site is on a page builder. Can it be fixed?
Improved, usually. Made genuinely fast, often not — a builder ships its own CSS and JavaScript on every page whether the page uses it or not. We tell you which case yours is before quoting.
Do you just install a caching plugin?
Where it helps, and last rather than first. Caching hides a slow site from some visitors; it does not make the site fast.
How soon will I see a difference?
Lab figures move the same day. Search Console is a rolling twenty-eight-day average, so the numbers that matter for ranking take about a month to reflect the work.
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