Website speed optimization

Website speed optimization for small businesses

Fixing the heavy images, bloated code and slow hosting that keep pages from loading.

What this is

Speed is one of the few site problems with an honest number attached. A page either paints quickly on an ordinary phone connection or it does not, and you can measure it before and after rather than argue about it.

It matters twice: visitors leave slow pages, and load speed is a factor search engines use, particularly on mobile.

What you get

What usually gets fixed

  • 01

    Images

    Almost always the biggest win, and almost always the cause. Photos uploaded straight from a phone or a camera are many times larger than the space they are displayed in. Resizing and re-encoding them regularly cuts page weight by most of its total.

  • 02

    What loads before the page paints

    Fonts, scripts and stylesheets that block rendering push back the moment a visitor sees anything. Much of it can be deferred or dropped.

  • 03

    Third-party scripts

    Chat widgets, trackers, embedded feeds and pixels accumulate over years. Each one is someone else's server in the path between your visitor and your page.

  • 04

    Hosting and delivery

    Sometimes the honest answer is that the host is the ceiling and no amount of tuning gets past it. If so I will say that rather than bill you for tuning.

  • 05

    A measurement either side

    Numbers before and after, on mobile, so the work can be judged rather than taken on trust.

What it costs

Quoted after a free consult, because what it takes depends entirely on what you already have. Book a call, I will tell you what is involved, and you get a number before anything starts. Website plan details are on the pricing page.

How this differs

This is one metric and one deliverable: how long the page takes to become useful. Technical SEO is the wider set of things that stop Google reading a site at all, of which speed is one item among indexing, duplication and crawl problems.

It is also distinct from website maintenance, which keeps a fast site from slowly getting heavy. This is remedial work on a site that is already slow.

If your site is slow because of the platform it was built on, tuning it has a ceiling. In that case the honest options are a migration or a redesign, and I would rather tell you that than take payment for a couple of tenths of a second.

Questions

What people ask

What counts as fast enough?

The target most worth aiming at is that the main content appears within about two and a half seconds on a mid-range phone on a normal mobile connection. The exact figure matters less than whether it is measured on a phone rather than on a desktop with fast internet.

Will this fix my Google rankings?

On its own, rarely. Speed is one factor among many and it is mostly a tiebreaker. It matters most when a slow site is actively losing visitors before they see anything, which is a conversion problem as much as a ranking one.

What is the most common cause?

Images, by a wide margin. A single unoptimised photograph can outweigh an entire well-built page.

Do you need access to my site?

Yes, for the work itself. The initial measurement can be taken from outside without any access at all, which is usually where a consult starts.

Find out what is actually slowing it down

Tell me what is going on and I will tell you whether this is what you actually need. No pitch deck and no pressure.

Book a free consult