How to Improve Website Speed: Quick Wins for Faster Pages

If you want to speed up your website, you've got to focus on four big wins: optimising your images, minifying your code (CSS, JavaScript), leveraging browser caching, and choosing high-performance hosting. Nailing these four pillars is the fastest way to slash your page load times and give your visitors a much better experience.

Why Website Speed Is Your Biggest Competitive Edge

In a crowded market, a slow website doesn’t just frustrate people—it actively sends them packing and hurts your bottom line. Speed isn't some techy "nice-to-have" anymore; it's a core part of your customer experience, brand perception, and ability to make money.

Think of it like this: your website is your digital shopfront. A fast site is clean, well-lit, and welcoming. A slow one has a sticky door and a massive queue just to get in. Which one do you think people will choose?

When someone lands on your site, you have mere seconds to make a good impression. If your page is still chugging away, that first interaction is already negative. This friction is a bounce rate killer. Impatient users will just hit the back button and click on your competitor’s link instead. This isn’t a guess; it's a measurable business problem.

The Real-World Impact on Conversions and Trust

Slow performance directly tanks user trust and kills conversions. For a UK e-commerce store, a two-second delay at checkout is enough to make someone abandon their cart. For a SaaS business, a sluggish dashboard makes the whole product feel clunky and unreliable, leading to churn. Every extra second of waiting plants a seed of doubt.

The link between speed, search rankings, and user behaviour is crystal clear. Google's Core Web Vitals didn't just appear out of nowhere; metrics like Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) are now a direct factor in how visible you are.

Across UK domains, sites with ‘good’ Core Web Vitals scores consistently show up higher in search results. When UK pages get their LCP into Google's green zone, they often see organic click-through rates jump by 8–18% and a 24% drop in users who leave before the page even loads.

A fast website signals professionalism and reliability. It tells users you value their time and have invested in creating a seamless experience, which is the foundation of building a loyal customer base.

To help you visualise where to start, here’s a quick rundown of fixes that deliver the most bang for your buck.

High-Impact Fixes for Faster Website Speed

This table summarises the most impactful actions you can take to immediately improve your website's loading times, ordered by impact versus effort.

Focusing on the items in this table will give you the most noticeable improvements in the shortest amount of time.

Shifting from an IT Problem to a Growth Strategy

Ultimately, you need to stop seeing performance as a task for the IT department and start treating it as a core business strategy. Improving how quickly your pages load is directly tied to your most important KPIs.

A great first step is to run a thorough review to see where the biggest bottlenecks are. Our complete website audit checklist can walk you through identifying the most critical areas for improvement.

For a deeper dive into the technical side of things, you can also explore these additional strategies for improving website speed and boosting SEO. By putting speed at the top of your priority list, you're not just tweaking a website—you're investing in a better user journey, a stronger presence on search engines, and higher conversion rates.

Finding Your True Performance Baseline

Before you start tinkering with code or squashing images, you need to know exactly what you’re up against. Guessing about your website speed is a recipe for wasted effort. The first, non-negotiable step is to establish a clear, accurate performance baseline.

This isn’t about chasing a single, generic score. A simple "92 out of 100" from a tool doesn't tell you the whole story of how real people experience your site. You need to dig into the specific metrics that paint a picture of the user's journey, from their initial click to actually using your page.

Moving Beyond a Single Score

Tools like Google’s PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, and the Lighthouse report built right into Chrome are your best friends here. They don’t just give you a grade; they hand you a detailed diagnostic report, pointing out the exact elements slowing you down. Think of it less like a school report card and more like an MRI scan for your website's health.

I’ve seen UK retail sites get a decent overall score but have a terrible Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) time. This tells you that despite some things being fast, the main product image or banner is taking forever to appear, creating a perception of slowness. That's the kind of specific insight you can actually act on.

This initial diagnostic is all about prioritisation. Why spend a week optimising tiny CSS files when your uncompressed hero image is the real villain, adding three seconds to your load time?

This decision tree gives you a simple way to think about your next steps.

As the visual shows, it all starts with analysis. Only then can you figure out which fixes will give you the most bang for your buck.

The Metrics That Truly Matter

Don't get lost in a sea of acronyms. While there are dozens of metrics you could track, it’s best to focus on the ones that most closely reflect the real user experience. These are primarily the Core Web Vitals and a few other critical indicators.

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): How long does it take for the biggest, most important piece of content to show up? For an e-commerce site, this is almost always the main product photo. An LCP under 2.5 seconds is what you’re aiming for.

• Interaction to Next Paint (INP): This newer metric measures how quickly your page reacts when someone interacts with it—like clicking a button or opening an accordion menu. A low INP makes your site feel snappy and responsive, not laggy.

• Time to First Byte (TTFB): How long does it take for the browser to get the very first byte of information from your server? A high TTFB is often a dead giveaway for hosting issues or server-side problems that need fixing before you touch anything else.

To really get a handle on where you stand, you need more than a one-off test. It's wise to set up ongoing performance monitoring and website optimization to get a continuous view of these metrics over time.

A classic mistake is testing only the homepage. Your product pages, blog posts, and checkout process could have completely different performance profiles. Make sure you analyse your most important and highest-traffic pages individually.

Running a Practical Test

Right, let’s put this into practice. Head over to PageSpeed Insights and pop in the URL for one of your key pages.

The report will immediately show you whether you pass or fail the Core Web Vitals assessment—a simple red or green light. But the real gold is further down.

Scroll past the main score to the "Opportunities" and "Diagnostics" sections. This is your action plan. The tool will give you specific, concrete advice like "Serve images in next-gen formats" or "Reduce unused JavaScript." Better yet, it even estimates the potential time savings for each fix.

By running these tests across your key pages, you'll start to see patterns. Maybe oversized images are a site-wide issue, or a specific third-party script is dragging every page down. This data-driven baseline is the foundation for making smart, impactful changes that genuinely improve how fast your site feels to a real person.

Building on a Foundation of Fast Hosting and CDN

Think of your website's hosting as its engine. You can bolt on the sleekest bodywork and the lightest wheels, but if the engine is sputtering, you're not winning any races. All the clever on-page optimisations—like squashed images and squeaky-clean code—will ultimately be throttled by a slow server.

This is where a metric called Time To First Byte (TTFB) becomes incredibly important. In simple terms, it’s how long your browser has to wait for the server to even start sending data. A high TTFB is a dead giveaway that your server is struggling, creating a delay before your page can even begin to render.

Choosing the Right Hosting Engine

For any UK-based business, the physical location of your server is a huge deal. Data doesn't travel instantly; sending it across oceans takes time. If your customers are in the UK, choosing a hosting provider with data centres right here on home soil can massively cut down latency and make your site feel instantly more responsive.

Let's quickly run through the usual suspects when it comes to hosting:

• Shared Hosting: The budget option. You're sharing server space and resources with potentially hundreds of other sites. It's a bit like living in a big block of flats—it's cheap, but a noisy neighbour can hog all the resources and slow everyone else down.
• VPS (Virtual Private Server) Hosting: A serious step up. You still share a physical server, but a slice of it is dedicated entirely to you. This gives you far more consistent performance and is the go-to for most growing businesses.
• Dedicated Hosting: The top of the line. You get an entire server to yourself, offering the best possible performance and security. It comes with a price tag to match, but for high-traffic sites or businesses with strict security needs, it's the right call.

Don’t underestimate the impact of a good server. An analysis of UK e-commerce and service sites revealed that getting server response times and TTFB under 200ms was directly linked to conversion rate increases of between 5–12%. A slow server literally costs you money.

A slow server is a performance bottleneck you can't optimise your way out of. If your TTFB is consistently high (over 600ms), a hosting upgrade is often the single most powerful speed improvement you can make.

Using a CDN: A Local Depot for Your Website

So you’ve got fast UK hosting sorted. Fantastic. But what about your visitors from Manchester, Edinburgh, or even further afield? This is where a Content Delivery Network (CDN) comes into play.

A CDN is a global network of servers that caches your site's static assets—things like images, CSS stylesheets, and JavaScript files. When someone visits your site, the CDN delivers these files from a server that's physically closest to them, rather than from your main server.

For a business based in London, this means a customer in Glasgow gets your website’s images from a server nearby, not all the way from the capital. This simple bit of networking magic dramatically cuts down load times, especially for a geographically spread-out audience.

Assessing Your Current Setup

The good news is that most modern platforms, like Webflow, bundle high-performance hosting and a built-in CDN right out of the box. This integrated approach is a huge advantage, as the entire system is built for speed from the ground up. You can get the full rundown on how it works in our ultimate guide to Webflow website hosting.

If you’re on a platform like WordPress or have a custom-built site, however, you need to pay close attention to your hosting provider. Check your speed test reports and look at that TTFB number. If it's consistently poor, it’s time to think about moving. Upgrading from a basic shared plan to a managed VPS or a specialised host can be a night-and-day difference, finally unlocking the true potential of all your other optimisation work.

Mastering Media for a Lighter, Faster Website

Let's talk about the heaviest items on almost any webpage: your media files. The images, videos, and custom fonts are almost always the biggest culprits behind slow load times. This makes them your single greatest opportunity for a quick and dramatic speed boost.

Taming these assets isn't about complex technical wizardry. It’s about building a few smart habits into your workflow.

The commercial impact of getting this right is huge. Audits consistently find that images make up 40–60% of the total page weight on typical UK websites. By simply using modern formats and proper compression, you can slash that page weight by up to 45%. That simple change can trim your Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) time by over a second and has been shown to lift conversion rates by 6–15%.

The goal here isn't to strip your site of its visual identity. It’s about being smart—serving high-quality media in the smallest file size possible, so your pages look fantastic without making visitors wait.

Embrace Next-Generation Image Formats

For years, JPEG and PNG were the undisputed champions of the web. They still have their place, but they've been overtaken by far more efficient formats that give you better compression without sacrificing quality. Your new go-to options should be WebP and AVIF.

• WebP: Developed by Google, WebP is a brilliant all-rounder. It offers both lossy and lossless compression, making it a perfect replacement for both JPEGs and PNGs. A WebP file is often 25-35% smaller than a comparable JPEG, with no quality drop you'd ever notice.
• AVIF: This is the new kid on the block, and it's incredibly powerful. AVIF can achieve even greater compression than WebP, sometimes creating files that are 50% smaller than the original JPEG. Browser support is now excellent, but it’s still wise to have a WebP or JPEG fallback just in case.

Many modern platforms and tools can automatically convert your JPEGs and PNGs on upload, serving the best format based on what the user's browser supports. It’s a set-and-forget optimisation that delivers massive returns.

Choosing the Right Image Format

This table should help you decide which format to use and when. It’s all about balancing performance with compatibility.

As a rule of thumb, use WebP or AVIF for all photographic and illustrative images. For logos and simple icons, stick with SVG—it’s a vector format that scales perfectly while keeping file sizes tiny.

Implement Smart Compression and Resizing

Serving the right format is only half the battle. You also have to make sure the image is properly compressed and sized for its container on the page.

Never, ever upload a massive 4000px wide image straight from a camera and just let the browser shrink it. This forces the user to download a huge file only to display a small version of it. It’s a complete waste of bandwidth.

Instead, resize your images to the maximum dimensions they'll actually be displayed at. If your blog's content area is 800px wide, your images shouldn't be any wider. Better yet, use responsive image techniques (like the srcset attribute) to serve different sizes for different screens.

Once resized, run your images through a compression tool. There are plenty of fantastic options out there that intelligently strip out unnecessary data without degrading visual quality. To help you find the right one, check out our guide on the best image optimization tools.

A common mistake is optimising an image once and then forgetting about it. Always re-compress images after you make edits or crop them. The file data changes, creating new opportunities to shrink it down.

Defer Offscreen Media with Lazy Loading

Why force a user to download every single image on a long page the moment they arrive? Lazy loading is a simple but incredibly powerful technique that tells the browser not to load offscreen images and videos until the user actually scrolls them into view.

This has a profound effect on the initial page load. The browser only has to download the content visible "above the fold," making that critical first render happen much, much faster. Both your LCP score and your overall page weight will thank you for it.

The best part? Modern browsers now support this natively. Just add the loading="lazy" attribute to your image tags, and you're good to go. It’s one of the easiest performance wins you can get.

How to Clean Up Your Code and Scripts

While hefty images are the most obvious speed bumps, it's often the bloated code and unnecessary scripts that are the silent killers of website performance. They work away in the background, forcing a user's browser to download, parse, and execute files that can grind everything to a halt before a single pixel even appears on the screen.

Think of your website's code as a set of instructions for the browser. The cleaner and more direct those instructions are, the faster the browser can follow them. Every needless comment, extra space, or inefficient script is like throwing in a confusing, pointless step that just slows the whole process down.

Cleaning up your code is really about making these instructions as lean and efficient as possible. This kind of technical tune-up is one of the most effective ways to improve website speed because it directly cuts down the amount of work the browser has to do.

Slim Down Your Files with Minification

The first and easiest win here is minification. This is simply an automated process that strips out all the non-essential characters from your code files. We're talking about all the extra spaces, line breaks, and developer comments that are helpful for us humans but completely meaningless to a browser.

Saving a few bytes per file might not sound like a big deal, but it adds up surprisingly quickly across dozens of CSS and JavaScript files. The result is smaller file sizes, which means faster download times for your visitors. It’s a straightforward, automated victory with literally no downside.

If you're on WordPress, plugins like WP Rocket or Autoptimize can handle this with just a few clicks. On platforms like Webflow, this is often handled automatically, but it’s always worth a quick check to make sure your code is being served in its most compact form.

Prioritise What Loads First

Not all code is created equal. Some scripts are absolutely essential for rendering the content your user sees straight away, while others—like a chatbot widget or an analytics tracker—can definitely wait. The problem is, a browser will try to load everything it finds by default, which can create a serious bottleneck.

This is where you need to be a bit clever about loading priority. The main goal is to stop non-essential scripts from blocking the rendering of your critical, above-the-fold content. You have two main tools for this job:

• Defer: Adding a defer attribute to a script tag tells the browser to download the file in the background and only run it after the main HTML document has been fully parsed. This is perfect for scripts that aren't needed for the initial view.

• Async: The async attribute also lets the script download in the background without blocking the HTML parsing. However, it will execute the moment it's downloaded, which can still interrupt the rendering process if it happens at an awkward moment.

My Tip: For most third-party scripts (think analytics, social media widgets, etc.), defer is almost always the safer and better choice. It guarantees your core page content gets top priority, leading to a much faster perceived load time for the user.

Hunt Down and Remove Unused Code

Over time, websites have a tendency to accumulate "code clutter". This is especially true for sites built on a CMS like WordPress. Old plugins you've deactivated, features you've since removed, or elements from previous theme designs can all leave behind orphaned CSS and JavaScript files that are still being loaded on every single page visit.

This is just dead weight. A user's device is forced to download and process code that does absolutely nothing on the page they are looking at. It's an incredibly common issue that often goes completely unnoticed.

Page speed audit tools like Lighthouse are brilliant at flagging this. Keep an eye out for the "Reduce Unused CSS" and "Reduce Unused JavaScript" recommendations; they will show you exactly which files contain code that isn't being used on the current page.

Finding this clutter is the first step. For WordPress sites, you can use a plugin like Asset CleanUp to selectively stop scripts and styles from loading on pages where they aren't needed. For instance, the script for your contact form plugin has no business loading on every single blog post.

On custom-built sites, this process is more manual but just as critical. It involves a careful audit of your stylesheets and scripts to identify and remove legacy code. It might feel like a bit of a spring clean, but the performance gains from shedding all that unnecessary weight are more than worth the effort.

Still Have Questions About Site Speed?

Even with a solid plan, you're bound to run into questions as you start digging into your site's performance. It’s completely normal. Most people hit the same roadblocks or get tangled up in similar technical details.

Let's clear the air and tackle some of the most common queries we hear. Think of this as your go-to guide for those "but what about..." moments.

How Often Should I Be Checking My Website Speed?

One of the biggest mistakes I see is treating performance optimisation as a one-and-done task. You run a few tests, tick some boxes, and then forget all about it for another year. A much better way to think about it is like regular car maintenance—it's an ongoing process.

For most businesses, a full performance audit once a quarter is a great rhythm. It’s frequent enough to catch new issues before they snowball into bigger problems. But you should also get into the habit of running a quick check after any significant site changes, like:

• Adding a new app or third-party script.
• Uploading a big batch of new images or videos.
• Switching to a new theme or rolling out a major design update.

This simple habit keeps small performance drains from piling up, ensuring your site stays quick and responsive over the long haul.

Can a Slow Site Genuinely Hurt My SEO Ranking?

Absolutely. There's no ambiguity here—the link between site speed and SEO is direct and undeniable. Google has been crystal clear that page experience, which heavily features the Core Web Vitals, is a major ranking factor. A slow site doesn't just annoy your visitors; it signals to search engines that you’re delivering a subpar experience.

A sluggish Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) or a laggy Interaction to Next Paint (INP) can directly drag down your search visibility. And don't forget the knock-on effects: a high bounce rate, a classic symptom of slow load times, sends a powerful negative signal to Google that your page isn't giving users what they want.

In short, a fast website is table stakes for modern SEO. If two sites have equally brilliant content, the faster one will almost always get the nod in search rankings. It's a foundational piece you simply can't afford to get wrong.

What’s a “Good” Page Load Time to Aim For?

While "as fast as humanly possible" is the easy answer, having concrete targets helps. Based on years of user data, the sweet spot is getting your key content visible and interactive in under 3 seconds.

To get more specific, here are the Core Web Vitals targets you should be aiming for:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Under 2.5 seconds. This tells users the main content has arrived quickly.
• Interaction to Next Paint (INP): Under 200 milliseconds. This makes your page feel incredibly responsive and snappy.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Under 0.1. This stops those annoying visual jumps as the page loads.

Nailing these targets puts you squarely in Google's "good" category and is a strong benchmark for an excellent user experience. Hitting these numbers consistently is a sure sign your optimisation efforts are paying off.

Is a CDN Really Necessary If All My Customers Are Local?

That's a fantastic question. It seems logical, right? If your entire audience is in Manchester and your server is also in Manchester, a Content Delivery Network (CDN) can feel like overkill. In that very specific scenario, the raw speed benefit won't be as dramatic as it would for a global brand.

However, a CDN brings a lot more to the table than just geographic speed boosts. Many CDNs bundle in extra security features, like DDoS protection and a Web Application Firewall (WAF). They're also much better at handling sudden traffic spikes than a single server, keeping your site online and stable when you get an unexpected surge of visitors.

For the vast majority of businesses, even local ones, the reliability and security perks alone make a CDN a smart move. Besides, most high-quality hosting providers now include a CDN as standard, so you often get these benefits without any extra cost or complicated setup.

At Derrick.dk, we specialise in building high-performing, conversion-focused Webflow websites that turn your speed into a competitive advantage. If you're ready to fix performance issues and create a site that delivers results, book a call with us today.