Website speed optimisation
A slow website loses the enquiry before anyone sees your prices.
Someone taps your listing while standing in a car park on two bars of signal. If the page hasn't shown them anything useful in three seconds, they've gone back and tapped the next business. That's not a technical problem, it's a lost job.
In short
We make existing websites load fast on real phones: image compression and sizing, caching, script deferral, font fixes and Core Web Vitals work, measured from actual visitor data in Search Console rather than a single lab score. Quoted per site after a free look at what's slowing yours down.
What the work involves
Image compression, resizing and modern formats
Correct width and height so pages stop jumping about
Lazy loading for anything below the fold
Caching and compression at server level
Deferring tracking, chat and third-party scripts
Removing plugins and scripts nothing uses
Font loading fixed so text appears immediately
Core Web Vitals measured from real visitors
Hosting advice when hosting is the bottleneck
A before and after you can actually read
Images are the problem on nearly every site we open
A modern phone takes a photo four or five megabytes in size, several thousand pixels wide. It gets uploaded exactly as it came off the camera, and the browser is asked to download all of it to display something a few hundred pixels wide on a phone screen. Put eight of those on a homepage and you've built a page that weighs more than a feature film's trailer.
Fixing it isn't clever, it's just done properly: resize to the largest size actually displayed, compress, serve modern formats with fallbacks, set width and height so the layout doesn't jump while things load, and lazy-load anything below the fold. On a typical trades or garage website that single pass often halves the page weight before anything else is touched.
It's also the fix that lasts, provided the next photo goes through the same process. We show you how to do that, or handle it as part of maintenance — and it's the same eye we bring to photo and image work.
Core Web Vitals, without the jargon
Google measures three things from real visitors, and each one has a plain meaning.
Largest Contentful Paint is how long until the main thing on the page — usually your hero image or headline — is visible. Under two and a half seconds is the target. Big images and slow hosting are the usual culprits.
Interaction to Next Paint is how quickly the page responds when someone taps. Heavy scripts running while you're trying to tap a "call" button is what makes a site feel cheap even when it looks expensive.
Cumulative Layout Shift is the page jumping about as things load — you go to tap a link and an advert or an image pushes it out from under your finger. It's caused by images and embeds without reserved space, and it's fully preventable.
We read these from Search Console, which reports what your actual visitors experienced on their actual devices. Lab tools like PageSpeed Insights are useful for finding the cause, but the field data is what decides whether the problem is real. This sits alongside the broader work on our technical SEO page.
When speed work isn't the answer
We'd rather turn work down than sell you a tune-up on an engine that needs replacing. Three cases where speed work is the wrong spend.
The platform is the ceiling. Some drag-and-drop builders load a fixed pile of scripts on every page no matter what you do. You can win a bit; you can't win a lot. We'll tell you the realistic best case before you pay for it.
The site is already fast and still gets no enquiries. Then speed was never the problem. It's usually structure — no page for the service people search for — or nothing on the page telling a visitor what to do next. A free website review finds which of the two it is.
The build is old enough that everything fights you. If we'd spend a day working around the theme before improving anything, a rebuild gives you a faster site and a better structure for similar money.
Common questions
Does website speed affect Google rankings?
It's one signal among many, and it's not the biggest — a fast page about nothing won't outrank a useful slow one. Where speed decides things is between two similar pages, and in what visitors do: slow pages on mobile get abandoned before they load, and that behaviour is visible to Google whether or not speed itself is the ranking factor.
What is a good loading time?
Aim for the main content appearing in under two and a half seconds on a mid-range phone on mobile data, not on your office broadband on a laptop. That's the standard Google's Core Web Vitals measure against, and it's the one your customers experience.
What usually makes a small business site slow?
Images, nine times out of ten. Photos straight off a phone at several megabytes each, in the wrong format, with no sizing. After that: too many plugins or scripts, no caching, tracking and chat widgets loading before the page, and hosting that's cheap for a reason.
My PageSpeed score is 40. Is that a disaster?
Not on its own. The score is a lab simulation and it swings between runs. What matters is the field data in Search Console, which is measured from real visitors on real devices. We work from that, then use the lab tools to find causes.
Can you speed up a site you didn't build?
Usually a long way, yes. WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, Shopify and custom builds all have their own limits, and we'll tell you upfront which fixes are available on your platform and which ones aren't. Sometimes the honest answer is that the platform is the ceiling.
How much does speed work cost?
Quoted per site after a look, because the first job is finding out what's actually slow. Most small sites are a single focused piece of work rather than an ongoing cost — you fix the images and the caching once and it stays fixed if nobody undoes it.
Will it break how the site looks?
No. Speed work is compression, sizing, loading order and caching, not stripping the design out. If something genuinely can't stay — a heavy slider that nobody clicks, say — we'll show you what it's costing and let you decide.
Can you guarantee a 100 score?
No, and be wary of anyone who does. A perfect lab score on a real business site with photos, forms and analytics is usually achieved by removing things you need. We aim for fast where it counts, on a phone, for the pages that bring you enquiries.
Want to know why your site feels slow?
Send us the address and we'll tell you what's actually causing it — the real numbers from a phone-sized test, in plain English, no charge.