Improving website speed

Even when a website looks great, slowness can cause it to lose customers to competitors. Even small delays can cause drops in rankings, traffic, and conversions.


Remove the delays that cost you enquiries

The real cost of a slow website can be measured in dollars – every second of load time costs visitors, rankings, and ultimately revenue.

When a single second delay can be the difference between a visitor becoming an enquiry or quietly leaving, we want to have a website that loads quickly, navigates smoothly and allows us to rapidly convert prospects into customers.

Only by diagnosing performance at its core can we fix the root causes, not just the symptoms, of slow websites.

The business benefits of website performance optimisation

Improving website speed is a simple way for websites to rank higher in search engines, get more visitors, who stay for longer, and convert from curious prospects into customers at higher rates.

Not only is a website’s performance a direct ranking factor in search engine results pages, visitors will leave your website as load time increases – nowhere more so than on mobile, where a large share of enquiries, bookings and quote requests now originate.

A faster website means more visitors will stay long enough to actually convert, plus it provides a real structural ranking advantage over slower competitors.

Where website performance improvements can be made

The biggest wins usually aren’t buried in the code, but they’re embedded in page template layouts:

Quite often, these “design issues” are more responsible for a website’s slowness than anything happening at the infrastructural level – which means meaningful speed gains are often available far faster and less expensive than a full rebuild would suggest.

How it works

  1. Performance audit
    • Website performance tools like Lighthouse, WebPageTest and real-user monitoring are used to find the actual bottleneck – which is just as likely to be an overly large hero or poorly-optimised background image as anything in the code
  2. Content + design review
    • Oversized images, autoplaying videos, embedded third-party widgets and unnecessary web fonts are often the single biggest source of load times, and usually the fastest to fix
  3. Code + infrastructure optimisation
    • After the content-level fixes, we can work on under-the-hood fixes such as reducing or splitting the code, implementing caching, and improving server response times
  4. Continuous monitoring
    • Tracking core web vitals over time, since a website’s speed shifts every time new content or a new tool gets added to it

Frequently asked website speed questions

If you have more questions, feel free to ask about website performance.

Sometimes but not usually. A lot of the biggest speed gains come from content and design changes (such as image sizes, embedded widgets, autoplaying videos) rather than a full from-scratch website rebuild.

A performance audit identifies which of those are actually slowing a site down before anything more involved is considered.

They’re Google’s measures of real-world page experience, and are used directly as a search ranking signal.

  • Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
    • This tests a web page’s load speed, determined by the slowest required element
  • Interaction to Next Paint (INP)
    • This tests a web page’s responsiveness, ensuring that the site stays smooth during visitor interactions
  • Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
    • This test is about a website’s visual stability – the score lowers every time elements move after a web page has loaded

Together, these determine a web page visitor’s experience – not just during page load, but throughout the entire journey.

It depends on where you’re starting – sites weighed down by poorly-considered content structures can see load times cut substantially from simple layout changes alone.

Sites that are already lean but held back by hosting or code can see gains, but they are usually smaller, incremental improvements.

A performance review gives you a realistic answer for your site rather than a generic promise.


Get a free website performance review

A manual review by a website performance specialist to identify the issues worth investigating and improving upon.


Beyond speed, we offer other website optimisation services