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How do I make my website faster?
Speed matters because users abandon slow sites and Google ranks them lower. Both effects are bigger than most businesses realise. We've seen sites hit...
Speed matters because users abandon slow sites and Google ranks them lower. Both effects are bigger than most businesses realise. We’ve seen sites hit Core Web Vitals targets and double their organic conversions within a month, just because they stopped losing the impatient half of visitors.
Most speed problems are caused by three things: unoptimised images, render-blocking JavaScript, and slow hosting. Fix those and your Lighthouse score jumps 20-30 points.
The metrics that matter (Core Web Vitals)
LCP: Largest Contentful Paint
Time until the biggest visible element (usually the hero image or h1) renders. Target: under 2.5s. Most slow sites are slow here.
INP: Interaction to Next Paint
How long after a click before the page responds. Target: under 200ms. Replaced FID in 2024.
CLS: Cumulative Layout Shift
How much elements jump around as the page loads. Target: under 0.1. Caused by images without dimensions, late-loading ads, web fonts.
The biggest wins
Compress images
Most sites have hero images at 4MB that should be 200KB. JPEG at 80% quality is usually invisible compared to original. WebP format is 25-30% smaller again. Tools: Squoosh, ImageOptim, or any decent build process.
Set image dimensions
Every needs explicit width and height attributes. Without them, the browser can’t reserve space, and the page jumps as images load. Cumulative Layout Shift goes through the roof.
Lazy-load below-the-fold
Hero image: load eagerly. Everything below the fold: loading=“lazy”. Native browser support is good now, no plugins needed.
Defer JavaScript
Render-blocking JS in the is the biggest LCP killer. Add async or defer attributes. Move analytics, chat widgets, social embeds to load after the main content.
Use a CDN
Cloudflare (free tier or paid) caches static assets at edge locations. Australian visitors get content from Sydney edge instead of Sydney origin server. Often a 30-50% speed boost.
WordPress-specific
Plugin audit. Each active plugin adds load. Audit quarterly and deactivate anything not actively used. Especially page builders that add 200KB of CSS to every page.
Caching plugin. WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache, or Cloudflare Page Cache. One of these, configured properly, makes the biggest single improvement on most WP sites.
Database cleanup. Delete spam comments, post revisions, transient cache. Old WordPress sites accumulate megabytes of cruft.
PHP version. Should be 8.2+ in 2026. Older versions are slower and unsupported.
What people obsess over but shouldn’t
Lighthouse score. Useful as a directional metric, not as a target. A score of 95 with a slow Time-To-First-Byte is worse than 80 with fast TTFB.
Server location specificity. Australian-hosted vs US-hosted matters less than CDN configuration. A US-hosted site behind Cloudflare loads faster from Sydney than an Australian-hosted site without a CDN.
HTTP/3. Marginally faster than HTTP/2. Not where your gains come from.
Want this done, not just explained?
That's the same advice we give in a scoping call. When you want it executed, we run Local and Growth SEO programs for Australian businesses.