How to Speed Up Your Site and Stop Losing Customers
Learn how to improve your website speed. Practical optimization steps.
Imagine this scenario. A customer types a phrase into Google, one you've been carefully optimizing for. They click on your site. They wait one second, two, three… and close the tab. You've just lost a potential sale, and you don't even know it.
This isn't a hypothetical scenario. Research shows that over half of users abandon a page that takes longer than 3 seconds to load. In the age of instant gratification, a slow website isn't a minor technical issue. It's a hole in your marketing budget that money is pouring through.
The good news? Most speed problems can be fixed without hiring a developer and without spending a fortune. In this article, I'll show you where to start and what to focus on to make your site load lightning-fast.
Why a Slow Site Costs You More Than You Think
Before we get into specific solutions, it's worth understanding the scale of the problem. Page load speed affects nearly every aspect of your online presence.
Google Is Watching the Clock
For several years now, Google has officially treated page speed as a ranking factor. The algorithm has no sentiments. If your competition loads in 1.5 seconds and you load in 5 seconds, with similar content quality, they'll rank higher in search results. Simple.
What's more, Google introduced Core Web Vitals metrics that measure not just loading time, but also visual stability and responsiveness to user actions. A slow site can lose rankings even when you have great content and solid backlinks.
Users Don't Wait
Today's internet users are spoiled by speed. Netflix loads a movie in a second, Amazon shows products almost instantly. When your business website needs 6 seconds to display, users don't think "I'll wait, they might have interesting products." They think "something's wrong with this company" and go back to the search results.
Frustration with a slow site directly translates to trust in your brand. Research shows that users subconsciously associate slow sites with less credible companies. It's unfair, but that's how human psychology works.
Conversions Take a Nosedive
This is where the real business math begins. Every additional second of loading time means roughly 7% fewer conversions. If your online store generates $25,000 a month and loads in 6 seconds instead of 2, you're potentially losing $5,000 to $7,500. Every month. Year after year.
That's why speed optimization isn't an IT task that "we'll get to eventually." It's an urgent business matter with a direct impact on revenue.
Before You Start Fixing, You Need to Know What to Fix
The most common mistake I see with clients? They jump into optimization without diagnosis. They install random plugins, compress images by eye, switch hosting because someone recommended it. And then they wonder why the site is still slow.
Diagnostic Tools Are Your Starting Point
Before you change anything, go to Google's PageSpeed Insights and test your site. This free tool won't just show you a score from 0 to 100, more importantly, it will point out specific problems. You'll see whether images, the server, external scripts, or something else entirely is to blame.
Important: test both mobile and desktop versions. Google primarily indexes the mobile version, so that's what matters more for SEO. I often see sites that look and work great on desktop but are a disaster on mobile.
Don't Be Fooled by a Single Test
Results can vary depending on the time of day, server load, and the location you're testing from. Run several tests at different times. If results fluctuate between 40 and 60, that's a completely different situation than a stable 45.
It's also worth using GTmetrix or WebPageTest as a second opinion. Each tool has a slightly different approach to measurement and may catch problems that others missed.
Images: The Biggest Culprit Behind Slow Sites
In 90% of cases when I analyze a slow site, the first problem is images. That's no coincidence. Graphics often make up 50 to 70% of a page's total weight. A single unoptimized JPG straight from a camera can weigh 5 MB, when after proper compression and scaling it should be 150–200 KB.
Compression Is Essential
Before you upload any photo to your site, run it through a compression tool. TinyPNG works great for both PNG and JPG. For more advanced users, ImageOptim on Mac or FileOptimizer on Windows give even better results.
Lossless compression can reduce file size by 30 to 50% without visible quality loss. Lossy compression goes further, and with the right settings the difference is practically unnoticeable to the naked eye while the file is 70 to 80% lighter.
Format Matters
JPG and PNG are formats from the '90s. Today we have WebP, which at the same quality is 25 to 35% lighter. Most modern browsers support this format without issue. Even better is AVIF, though browser support is still developing.
If your site runs on WordPress, plugins like ShortPixel or Imagify automatically convert images to WebP and serve the appropriate version depending on the user's browser. If you're using Next.js or a similar framework, this is built in.
Lazy Loading: Load What's Visible
A user landing on your page initially sees only what fits on the screen. There's no point loading images from the bottom of the page right awaythey might never scroll down to them.
Lazy loading means images are only fetched when the user approaches them by scrolling. In modern browsers, you just need to add the loading="lazy" attribute to image tags. WordPress and most JavaScript frameworks do this automatically.
Server Cache: Don't Make Your Server Work Twice
Sites built on WordPress or other CMS platforms work dynamically. When a user visits your site, the server has to query the database, fetch content, put everything together, and only then send the finished HTML to the browser. This takes time, especially when the hosting isn't the fastest.
How Server Cache Works
Server cache (page cache) is a mechanism that saves the generated HTML page and serves it to subsequent users without rebuilding it. Instead of querying the database and rendering the page from scratch every time, the server delivers a ready-made copy. The result? Response time drops from several seconds to fractions of a second.
Well-configured server cache can speed up page loading by as much as 70 to 90%. That's a huge difference, especially on weaker shared hosting where resources are limited.
Configuration in Practice
On WordPress, the simplest solution is a caching plugin. WP Rocket is paid but offers the best results with minimal configuration. Free alternatives include LiteSpeed Cache (if your hosting supports it) or W3 Total Cache. These plugins automatically save generated pages and serve them from cache instead of building them from scratch.
For Next.js-based sites, things work differently because the framework uses Static Site Generation (SSG) and Incremental Static Regeneration (ISR). Pages are generated once during the build process or refreshed at specified intervals, which gives a similar effect without additional configuration.
Watch Out for Pitfalls
Server cache is a powerful tool, but it has its catches. If you forget to clear the cache after updating content, users might see the old version of the page. Pages with forms, shopping carts, or login panels require cache exclusions because each user should see their own data, not a saved copy.
So after implementing caching, test your site thoroughly. Check contact forms, adding products to the cart, logging into the customer panel. Make sure dynamic elements work correctly and that content changes are visible immediately after publishing.
Hosting: The Foundation You Can't Skip
You can optimize images to perfection, implement the world's best cache, and remove every unnecessary script. If your hosting is weak, your site will still be slow.
How to Recognize a Hosting Problem
Server response time (TTFB, Time to First Byte) should be under 200 milliseconds. If PageSpeed Insights shows values above 600 ms, that's a red flag. Other symptoms include frequent site "freezing," 503 errors during high traffic, or general instability.
Cheap hosting plans at $15 to $30 a year often mean sharing a server with hundreds of other sites. When one of them has a traffic spike or a poorly written script, your site slows down too.
What to Choose Instead of the Cheapest Option
For WordPress, dedicated hosts like WP Engine, Kinsta, or SiteGround (GrowBig plans and up) offer significantly better performance. You pay more, but you get servers optimized for WordPress, automatic backups, and technical support that understands your platform.
For Next.js-based sites, the natural choice is Vercel, the platform created by the framework's developers. Netlify and AWS Amplify are good alternatives. These platforms offer built-in CDN, automatic scaling, and deployment that just works.
CDN: Servers Around the World
A Content Delivery Network is a network of servers distributed globally. Instead of serving files from one location, your site is available from the server closest to the user. Someone in New York gets files from a server in the US East Coast, someone in London from a server in the UK.
Cloudflare offers a free plan that's sufficient for most sites. Setup takes 15 to 30 minutes and provides immediate improvement, especially for users from different parts of your country or abroad.
Plugins and Scripts: Less Means Faster
Every WordPress plugin, every library in a JavaScript project, every external script (Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, chat, maps), that's additional files to download and code to execute. The sum of these small loads can turn a fast site into a slug.
Audit What You Have
Go into your plugin list (WordPress) or package.json file (JavaScript projects) and ask yourself about each item: Is this really needed? Do I use this regularly? Is there a lighter alternative?
I often see sites with 30–40 plugins, half of which are inactive, and of the active ones, half do things the site owner stopped using long ago. Each such plugin may add its own CSS styles and JavaScript scripts that load on every page.
Get External Scripts Under Control
Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, Hotjar, live chat, social media widgets… each of these scripts contacts an external server and runs its code. I'm not saying to drop them if you need them. But it's worth loading them smarter.
Analytics and marketing scripts don't need to load immediately. You can delay them by 2–3 seconds or load them asynchronously so they don't block the page from displaying. A chat widget can appear only after the user has spent some time on the site. A YouTube video can show a thumbnail and only load the full player after being clicked.
Combining and Minifying Files
If your site loads 15 separate CSS and JavaScript files, that's 15 separate requests to the server. Combining them into fewer files (ideally one CSS and one JS) reduces the number of requests and speeds up loading.
Minification removes everything from files that the browser doesn't need: spaces, line breaks, comments. The file becomes unreadable to humans but 30 to 50% lighter. WordPress does this automatically with the right plugins, and modern JavaScript frameworks have this as standard when building the production version.
What's Next? Action Plan
Speeding up your site isn't a one-time task, it's a process. Start with diagnosis in PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix. Address the biggest problems first; usually those are images and hosting. Implement changes gradually and test after each one.
Remember that performance optimization is an investment with measurable returns. A faster site means better Google rankings, lower bounce rates, more conversions, and satisfied users. These aren't abstract metrics, they're real money in your pocket.
If you'd rather focus on running your business instead of the technical aspects of your site, we can help. At Anywwway, we regularly optimize client sites and know where to look for problems and how to solve them effectively. Sometimes a few hours of specialist work delivers better results than weeks of trying on your own.
I code professionally, I'm passionate about new tech, and when I'm not working, I'm probably taking photos.
Imagine this scenario. A customer types a phrase into Google, one you've been carefully optimizing for. They click on your site. They wait one second, two, three… and close the tab. You've just lost a potential sale, and you don't even know it.
This isn't a hypothetical scenario. Research shows that over half of users abandon a page that takes longer than 3 seconds to load. In the age of instant gratification, a slow website isn't a minor technical issue. It's a hole in your marketing budget that money is pouring through.
The good news? Most speed problems can be fixed without hiring a developer and without spending a fortune. In this article, I'll show you where to start and what to focus on to make your site load lightning-fast.
Why a Slow Site Costs You More Than You Think
Before we get into specific solutions, it's worth understanding the scale of the problem. Page load speed affects nearly every aspect of your online presence.
Google Is Watching the Clock
For several years now, Google has officially treated page speed as a ranking factor. The algorithm has no sentiments. If your competition loads in 1.5 seconds and you load in 5 seconds, with similar content quality, they'll rank higher in search results. Simple.
What's more, Google introduced Core Web Vitals metrics that measure not just loading time, but also visual stability and responsiveness to user actions. A slow site can lose rankings even when you have great content and solid backlinks.
Users Don't Wait
Today's internet users are spoiled by speed. Netflix loads a movie in a second, Amazon shows products almost instantly. When your business website needs 6 seconds to display, users don't think "I'll wait, they might have interesting products." They think "something's wrong with this company" and go back to the search results.
Frustration with a slow site directly translates to trust in your brand. Research shows that users subconsciously associate slow sites with less credible companies. It's unfair, but that's how human psychology works.
Conversions Take a Nosedive
This is where the real business math begins. Every additional second of loading time means roughly 7% fewer conversions. If your online store generates $25,000 a month and loads in 6 seconds instead of 2, you're potentially losing $5,000 to $7,500. Every month. Year after year.
That's why speed optimization isn't an IT task that "we'll get to eventually." It's an urgent business matter with a direct impact on revenue.
Before You Start Fixing, You Need to Know What to Fix
The most common mistake I see with clients? They jump into optimization without diagnosis. They install random plugins, compress images by eye, switch hosting because someone recommended it. And then they wonder why the site is still slow.
Diagnostic Tools Are Your Starting Point
Before you change anything, go to Google's PageSpeed Insights and test your site. This free tool won't just show you a score from 0 to 100, more importantly, it will point out specific problems. You'll see whether images, the server, external scripts, or something else entirely is to blame.
Important: test both mobile and desktop versions. Google primarily indexes the mobile version, so that's what matters more for SEO. I often see sites that look and work great on desktop but are a disaster on mobile.
Don't Be Fooled by a Single Test
Results can vary depending on the time of day, server load, and the location you're testing from. Run several tests at different times. If results fluctuate between 40 and 60, that's a completely different situation than a stable 45.
It's also worth using GTmetrix or WebPageTest as a second opinion. Each tool has a slightly different approach to measurement and may catch problems that others missed.
Images: The Biggest Culprit Behind Slow Sites
In 90% of cases when I analyze a slow site, the first problem is images. That's no coincidence. Graphics often make up 50 to 70% of a page's total weight. A single unoptimized JPG straight from a camera can weigh 5 MB, when after proper compression and scaling it should be 150–200 KB.
Compression Is Essential
Before you upload any photo to your site, run it through a compression tool. TinyPNG works great for both PNG and JPG. For more advanced users, ImageOptim on Mac or FileOptimizer on Windows give even better results.
Lossless compression can reduce file size by 30 to 50% without visible quality loss. Lossy compression goes further, and with the right settings the difference is practically unnoticeable to the naked eye while the file is 70 to 80% lighter.
Format Matters
JPG and PNG are formats from the '90s. Today we have WebP, which at the same quality is 25 to 35% lighter. Most modern browsers support this format without issue. Even better is AVIF, though browser support is still developing.
If your site runs on WordPress, plugins like ShortPixel or Imagify automatically convert images to WebP and serve the appropriate version depending on the user's browser. If you're using Next.js or a similar framework, this is built in.
Lazy Loading: Load What's Visible
A user landing on your page initially sees only what fits on the screen. There's no point loading images from the bottom of the page right awaythey might never scroll down to them.
Lazy loading means images are only fetched when the user approaches them by scrolling. In modern browsers, you just need to add the loading="lazy" attribute to image tags. WordPress and most JavaScript frameworks do this automatically.
Server Cache: Don't Make Your Server Work Twice
Sites built on WordPress or other CMS platforms work dynamically. When a user visits your site, the server has to query the database, fetch content, put everything together, and only then send the finished HTML to the browser. This takes time, especially when the hosting isn't the fastest.
How Server Cache Works
Server cache (page cache) is a mechanism that saves the generated HTML page and serves it to subsequent users without rebuilding it. Instead of querying the database and rendering the page from scratch every time, the server delivers a ready-made copy. The result? Response time drops from several seconds to fractions of a second.
Well-configured server cache can speed up page loading by as much as 70 to 90%. That's a huge difference, especially on weaker shared hosting where resources are limited.
Configuration in Practice
On WordPress, the simplest solution is a caching plugin. WP Rocket is paid but offers the best results with minimal configuration. Free alternatives include LiteSpeed Cache (if your hosting supports it) or W3 Total Cache. These plugins automatically save generated pages and serve them from cache instead of building them from scratch.
For Next.js-based sites, things work differently because the framework uses Static Site Generation (SSG) and Incremental Static Regeneration (ISR). Pages are generated once during the build process or refreshed at specified intervals, which gives a similar effect without additional configuration.
Watch Out for Pitfalls
Server cache is a powerful tool, but it has its catches. If you forget to clear the cache after updating content, users might see the old version of the page. Pages with forms, shopping carts, or login panels require cache exclusions because each user should see their own data, not a saved copy.
So after implementing caching, test your site thoroughly. Check contact forms, adding products to the cart, logging into the customer panel. Make sure dynamic elements work correctly and that content changes are visible immediately after publishing.
Hosting: The Foundation You Can't Skip
You can optimize images to perfection, implement the world's best cache, and remove every unnecessary script. If your hosting is weak, your site will still be slow.
How to Recognize a Hosting Problem
Server response time (TTFB, Time to First Byte) should be under 200 milliseconds. If PageSpeed Insights shows values above 600 ms, that's a red flag. Other symptoms include frequent site "freezing," 503 errors during high traffic, or general instability.
Cheap hosting plans at $15 to $30 a year often mean sharing a server with hundreds of other sites. When one of them has a traffic spike or a poorly written script, your site slows down too.
What to Choose Instead of the Cheapest Option
For WordPress, dedicated hosts like WP Engine, Kinsta, or SiteGround (GrowBig plans and up) offer significantly better performance. You pay more, but you get servers optimized for WordPress, automatic backups, and technical support that understands your platform.
For Next.js-based sites, the natural choice is Vercel, the platform created by the framework's developers. Netlify and AWS Amplify are good alternatives. These platforms offer built-in CDN, automatic scaling, and deployment that just works.
CDN: Servers Around the World
A Content Delivery Network is a network of servers distributed globally. Instead of serving files from one location, your site is available from the server closest to the user. Someone in New York gets files from a server in the US East Coast, someone in London from a server in the UK.
Cloudflare offers a free plan that's sufficient for most sites. Setup takes 15 to 30 minutes and provides immediate improvement, especially for users from different parts of your country or abroad.
Plugins and Scripts: Less Means Faster
Every WordPress plugin, every library in a JavaScript project, every external script (Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, chat, maps), that's additional files to download and code to execute. The sum of these small loads can turn a fast site into a slug.
Audit What You Have
Go into your plugin list (WordPress) or package.json file (JavaScript projects) and ask yourself about each item: Is this really needed? Do I use this regularly? Is there a lighter alternative?
I often see sites with 30–40 plugins, half of which are inactive, and of the active ones, half do things the site owner stopped using long ago. Each such plugin may add its own CSS styles and JavaScript scripts that load on every page.
Get External Scripts Under Control
Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, Hotjar, live chat, social media widgets… each of these scripts contacts an external server and runs its code. I'm not saying to drop them if you need them. But it's worth loading them smarter.
Analytics and marketing scripts don't need to load immediately. You can delay them by 2–3 seconds or load them asynchronously so they don't block the page from displaying. A chat widget can appear only after the user has spent some time on the site. A YouTube video can show a thumbnail and only load the full player after being clicked.
Combining and Minifying Files
If your site loads 15 separate CSS and JavaScript files, that's 15 separate requests to the server. Combining them into fewer files (ideally one CSS and one JS) reduces the number of requests and speeds up loading.
Minification removes everything from files that the browser doesn't need: spaces, line breaks, comments. The file becomes unreadable to humans but 30 to 50% lighter. WordPress does this automatically with the right plugins, and modern JavaScript frameworks have this as standard when building the production version.
What's Next? Action Plan
Speeding up your site isn't a one-time task, it's a process. Start with diagnosis in PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix. Address the biggest problems first; usually those are images and hosting. Implement changes gradually and test after each one.
Remember that performance optimization is an investment with measurable returns. A faster site means better Google rankings, lower bounce rates, more conversions, and satisfied users. These aren't abstract metrics, they're real money in your pocket.
If you'd rather focus on running your business instead of the technical aspects of your site, we can help. At Anywwway, we regularly optimize client sites and know where to look for problems and how to solve them effectively. Sometimes a few hours of specialist work delivers better results than weeks of trying on your own.
I code professionally, I'm passionate about new tech, and when I'm not working, I'm probably taking photos.