Website speed isn't a technical nicety — it's money. A slow site loses customers before they read a word and quietly caps your Google rankings. The upside: most speed problems come from a short list of causes, and most are fixable. Here's what to do.
Why speed matters more than you think
Two hard facts:
- Google's 2016 data found that 53% of mobile site visits are likely to be abandoned if pages take longer than three seconds to load. Every extra second is enquiries walking out the door.
- Core Web Vitals are used by Google's ranking systems — they measure loading speed, responsiveness and visual stability. Good scores don't guarantee top rankings, but a slow site puts you at a disadvantage you don't need.
Speed is one of the rare things that improves both conversions and SEO at once.
What Core Web Vitals actually measure
Three things, in plain English:
- LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) — how fast the main content appears. Google recommends it happens within the first 2.5 seconds of the page starting to load.
- INP (Interaction to Next Paint) — how quickly the page responds when someone taps or clicks.
- CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) — whether things jump around as the page loads (the annoying effect where you tap the wrong button because the layout moved).
You can check all three for free on Google PageSpeed Insights — just paste your URL.
The fixes that matter most
1. Compress and right-size your images
Oversized images are one of the most common causes of slow sites. A photo straight off a phone can be 5MB when it needs to be 200KB.
Fix: Resize images to the size they actually display, compress them, and use modern formats like WebP. On image-heavy pages, this alone can make a noticeable difference.
2. Cut the plugin and script bloat
Every plugin, tracker and third-party widget adds weight. Many sites carry a dozen they don't even use.
Fix: Remove anything you don't need. Be ruthless — each one is a tax on every visit.
3. Use fast, modern hosting
Cheap, overcrowded shared hosting is slow at the server level, before your site even loads.
Fix: Use quality hosting with caching and a content delivery network (CDN) so your site loads fast everywhere.
4. Enable caching
Caching stores a ready-made version of your pages so they don't rebuild from scratch on every visit.
Fix: Turn on caching (a good host or plugin handles this) and your repeat-visit speed jumps.
5. Reserve space for content
Layout shift (CLS) happens when images or ads load without reserved space, shoving everything around.
Fix: Set width and height on images and reserve space for anything that loads late.
The uncomfortable truth about old sites
Sometimes the site itself is the problem — built years ago on a bloated theme with layers of plugins piled on. You can optimise a heavy site, but there's a floor to how fast it'll ever go. A modern, cleanly-built site is fast by design, not by patching. That's why we build every site — including our £99.99 48-hour websites — to pass Core Web Vitals from day one.
Quick self-check
- Paste your URL into Google PageSpeed Insights.
- Look at your mobile score and your LCP.
- If LCP is over 3 seconds, start with images and hosting.
Want your speed fixed properly?
A slow site is one of the most common (and most fixable) reasons a website underperforms. Our web design and development service rebuilds and optimises sites for speed, and a free audit will show you exactly what's slowing yours down and how much faster it could be. Because a fast site doesn't just rank better — it turns more visitors into customers.