How to check your website speed, and fix the easy wins

Why speed matters

People leave pages that take too long to load, especially on mobile. Google also uses page experience signals, including speed, as part of how it ranks pages. A faster site is better for customers and better for search.

How to test your site

1. Go to Google's free PageSpeed Insights tool and enter your web address.
2. Look at the mobile results first, because that is where most visitors are.
3. Read the list of suggestions under "Opportunities" and "Diagnostics".

The three numbers that matter

Google measures real-world experience with three Core Web Vitals:

The easy wins

Fix your images first

Oversized images are the most common cause of slow sites. Resize photos to the size they are actually shown at, compress them, and use modern formats such as WebP where possible. A photo straight from a phone camera can be many times larger than it needs to be.

Load images only when needed

Images further down the page can wait until the visitor scrolls near them. This is called lazy loading and most modern sites support it.

Limit fonts and extras

Each font family and weight is another file to download. Stick to one or two. Remove chat widgets, trackers and plugins you do not really use, because every extra script adds delay.

Avoid heavy decoration

Autoplaying background videos and big sliders look impressive but cost a lot of speed. Use them only where they genuinely help.

Choose decent hosting

Cheap, overloaded hosting makes every page slower. Good hosting with caching and a content delivery network helps pages load quickly wherever the visitor is. We offer managed hosting if you would like us to look after this for you.

Test again after each change

Change one thing at a time and re-run the test so you know what actually helped. Results vary a little between runs, so look for clear improvements, not tiny differences.