Site Speed
Website performance optimization is the process of making your pages load faster and respond quicker. It directly affects your search rankings, your conversion rates, and your user experience. But most advice is either too technical or too vague. This guide covers the specific fixes that have the highest impact, in the order you should implement them.
Optimize my site's performancePage speed affects three critical areas: SEO (Google uses Core Web Vitals as a ranking signal), conversions (faster pages convert better — Walmart found every 1-second improvement increased conversions by 2%), and user experience (40% of visitors abandon pages that take more than 3 seconds to load). If your site is slow, you're losing rankings, customers, and revenue simultaneously.
Images account for over 50% of page weight on most websites — they are almost always the #1 performance bottleneck. Fix: compress images (use tools like TinyPNG or Squoosh), convert to modern formats (WebP is 25-35% smaller than JPEG/PNG with the same quality), set width and height attributes on all images (prevents layout shift), use lazy loading for images below the fold (don't load them until the visitor scrolls to them), and use appropriately sized images (don't serve a 4000px image in a 400px slot).
JavaScript blocks page rendering — while the browser parses and executes JS, the page is frozen. Many sites load large JS bundles that aren't needed for the initial render. Fix: defer non-critical JavaScript (add the 'defer' attribute), load third-party scripts asynchronously, remove unused JavaScript (audit your bundles), and split large bundles into smaller chunks that load on demand. This can cut your load time by seconds.
How fast could your site be?
Run a free performance audit and see exactly what's slowing you down — plus a prioritised fix list.
A CDN stores copies of your site's static assets (images, CSS, JS) on servers around the world. When a visitor loads your page, assets are served from the server closest to them — reducing latency dramatically. Without a CDN, a visitor in London loading a site hosted in New York waits for data to travel across the Atlantic. With a CDN, they get it from a London edge server. Cloudflare, Fastly, and CloudFront all offer free or low-cost CDN plans.
Server response time (Time to First Byte) is how long it takes for your server to start sending data after a request. Google wants this under 200ms. Common causes of slow response: cheap shared hosting, no caching, heavy database queries, and bloated CMS plugins. Fix: upgrade to better hosting (VPS or dedicated), enable page caching (serve pre-built HTML instead of generating it on every request), use a caching plugin if you're on WordPress, and reduce database queries.
Minification removes unnecessary characters from CSS and JavaScript (whitespace, comments, line breaks) without changing functionality. Compression (Gzip or Brotli) compresses files before sending them, reducing transfer size by 60-80%. Most hosting platforms and CDNs support compression automatically — check that it's enabled. Minification is usually handled by build tools (Webpack, Vite) or CMS plugins.
After implementing fixes, measure: Google PageSpeed Insights (for Lighthouse scores), Chrome DevTools (for detailed waterfall analysis), and Core Web Vitals in Google Search Console (for real-world data from actual visitors). Velrix's audit checks all of these and shows you exactly which fixes will have the highest impact on your specific site — so you don't waste time on optimisations that won't help.
Every time you add an image, a script, or a plugin, you add weight to your pages. Performance optimization isn't a one-time fix — it's an ongoing practice. Velrix's audit engine checks your real Lighthouse scores, identifies the specific resources slowing you down, and lets you re-audit after each fix to measure the improvement.\n\nRun a free performance audit and start loading faster.
Optimize my site's performance