Improve your website speed

You improve your website speed by testing the page that matters most to you, then fixing whatever slows it down the most. Start by looking at your images, how fast your server responds, whether your files are compressed and cached, and your scripts. Your test result tells you which of these to start with.

What is page speed?

Page speed is how quickly a page loads and becomes usable for the person who opened it. It isn't one number. Google measures it with three Core Web Vitals, which look at loading, responsiveness and how stable the page stays while it loads:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) measures how long the main content takes to appear. It should happen within 2.5 seconds of the page starting to load.
• Interaction to Next Paint (INP) measures how quickly the page reacts when someone clicks, taps or types. A good page stays at 200 milliseconds or less.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures how much the layout jumps around while the page loads. Keep it at 0.1 or less.

Google suggests measuring these at the 75th percentile of page loads, for mobile and desktop separately. In practice, at least three out of four loads of your page should meet each target.

How to check your website speed

You can check your website speed with Google's PageSpeed Insights. Enter the address of your page and run the test, and you get one report for mobile and one for desktop. The mobile test simulates a mid-tier phone on a mobile network, while the desktop test uses a wired connection, so the scores can differ.

At the top of each report is a performance score from 0 to 100. A score of 90 or above is good, 50 to 89 needs improvement, and below 50 is poor. You can test any public page this way, a competitor's included, to see how your site compares.

The report holds two kinds of data. The real user data comes from Chrome users who visited the page over the last 28 days. The lab data comes from a test load in a controlled setting, which makes it useful for finding the cause of a problem. If your page is new or has few visitors, there may not be enough real user data for it. The report then shows the figures for your whole site instead, if the site as a whole has enough data.

Work on your mobile result first, because Google uses the mobile version of your site to index and rank it.

How hosting speed affects your website

Before a page can load, the server your website sits on has to respond. The time until the first part of that response reaches the browser is called time to first byte (TTFB). As a rough guide, 0.8 seconds or less is good and more than 1.8 seconds is poor. PageSpeed Insights shows your TTFB in the real user data.

TTFB shows when a web server is too slow to respond. If your TTFB is poor on every page, the server is the bottleneck, so start with your hosting before you look at your images or code. If only some pages are slow, work through the fixes below first, then check your TTFB again.

Hosting speed comes down to the server's storage, how much processing power and memory your site gets, and whether the server caches pages. On shared hosting, many websites share one server, so your site's speed also depends on how busy its neighbours are.

Our web hosting runs on NVMe SSD storage with built-in performance caching, and we optimise our servers for speed.

If your site has outgrown a shared server, a VPS gives it its own CPU, memory and storage, so other sites can't slow it down. Our VPS is unmanaged, though. You configure, run and manage it yourself, which may take some technical skill. A VPS is worth it when your TTFB stays poor on shared hosting at busy times and you, or someone you work with, are comfortable running a server. If not, a shared plan is the easier choice.

How to make your website faster

Work through the fixes below, starting with the one your test points to. Before you start, back up your site, so you can go back if a change breaks something. Each fix can increase your website speed on its own, so test the page again after every change to see what helped. If your site runs on a website builder, check which of these settings the builder lets you change. Your images and the third-party extras you add are yours to work on either way.

Optimise your images

If your report shows a slow Largest Contentful Paint, start with your images. They're the heaviest part of many pages. PageSpeed Insights points out images with a larger download size than they need. Resize those to the size they're shown at on screen, rather than uploading them straight from your camera or phone. The format matters too: a lossy WebP image is 25 to 34% smaller than a comparable JPEG, so check whether your image editor can save in it.

Images further down the page can wait. With lazy loading, the browser fetches them only as a visitor scrolls towards them. In the HTML, you add loading="lazy" to the image tag. Use it only for images outside the first screen a visitor sees, so the main image at the top still loads straight away.

If your Cumulative Layout Shift is poor, give every image and embedded video a width and height in the HTML. The browser then saves space for it before it loads, so the text around it doesn't jump.

Turn on compression

PageSpeed Insights tells you when the HTML of your page is sent without compression. Compression shrinks files before the server sends them, and the browser unpacks them again. For some files, it cuts the size by up to 70%. Images and videos are already compressed, so the gain is in text files such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

Gzip and Brotli are the two compression methods that matter today. Both shrink your text files on the server, and browsers support both. You switch compression on in your server's settings, not in your pages. On shared hosting, ask your host whether it's on for your site. On WordPress, check whether your caching plugin can switch it on for you.

Let browsers cache your files

The browser cache keeps copies of files a visitor has already downloaded, such as your logo, stylesheets and scripts. On the next visit, the browser reuses those copies instead of fetching them again. Your pages load faster, and your server has less work to do.

Your server tells the browser how long it can keep each file, so files that rarely change can be kept for longer. Give those files a long cache time, and put a version number or hash in each file's address, so a changed file gets a new address and browsers fetch the new copy. Before you set the cache time yourself, check whether your caching plugin or your host already does it.

Minify your code

Minifying removes what the browser doesn't need from your code, such as comments and spaces, so the files get smaller. It's usually an automatic step when a site is built, so check whether your website builder, theme or plugin already does it before you do anything by hand.

Load CSS first and defer JavaScript

Stylesheets and scripts in the head of a page can stop it from appearing until they've loaded. Lighthouse, the test behind the lab data in PageSpeed Insights, calls them render-blocking requests, and your report highlights the ones that held up the first paint of your page. Keep the CSS for what visitors see first near the top, and load the rest later.

If your report shows a poor Interaction to Next Paint, look at your JavaScript first. The defer and async attributes stop a script from holding up the page. With defer, the script runs once the browser has read the whole page. With async, it downloads alongside the page and runs as soon as it's ready. In most cases, defer is the safer choice, because the script can count on the whole page being there. Keep async for scripts that work on their own, such as a tracking code.

Use a CDN

A content delivery network (CDN) keeps copies of your files on servers in many places, so each visitor gets them from a server nearby. The shorter trip makes your pages load faster and takes work off your own server.

Cut redirects and third-party scripts

Each redirect sends the browser on an extra trip across the network before it can load the page, which can add hundreds of milliseconds. Link straight to a page's current address, not an old one that redirects.

Chat widgets, tracking codes, embedded feeds and other third-party scripts add more code for the browser to download. Go through them and remove the ones you no longer use.

Use a caching plugin on WordPress

On a WordPress site, a caching plugin such as WP Rocket can take care of several of these fixes at once. It caches your pages, minifies your CSS and JavaScript files and lazy loads your images. WP Rocket is a premium plugin, and you can add it to your hosting with us as an add-on.

How does page speed affect SEO?

Page speed can affect search engine optimisation (SEO), but it matters less than relevance. In July 2018, Google started using page speed as a ranking factor for mobile searches. At the time, it said the change would only affect the slowest pages and a small share of searches.

Today, Google recommends good Core Web Vitals for success in Search, as part of what it calls page experience. Relevance still comes first, though. Google says it tries to show the most relevant content even when the page experience is poor. A good experience helps most where many pages answer a search equally well.

Speed also matters to your visitors, not only to your rankings. When Google announced its speed update in 2018, it pointed out that people really care about how fast a page loads.

When the fixes are not enough

If your pages are still slow after these fixes while your server responds quickly, the site itself is probably what holds it back, such as an old theme or a heavy page design. Then it may be time to redesign your website with a faster, more modern design. A redesign can give your pages a clearer structure and faster load times.

If your TTFB is still poor after all these changes, your hosting may be what's holding your site back. The next step is to move your site to our web hosting, or to a VPS if it has outgrown a shared server.