Google has been clear: loading speed is a ranking factor. And beyond SEO, it's also a matter of user experience. A slow website is a website nobody visits.
How to measure?
Two free tools are enough:
- Google PageSpeed Insights — analyzes your site and gives a score out of 100
- Lighthouse (built into Chrome) — full audit: performance, accessibility, SEO, best practices
The most common causes
- Unoptimized images — a 5 MB photo where 200 KB would suffice
- Too much JavaScript — plugins, trackers, widgets piling up
- Slow hosting — an overloaded shared server
- No caching — the browser re-downloads everything on each visit
- Heavy web fonts — loading 8 variants of a Google Font
Quick fixes
- Convert images to WebP or AVIF
- Enable GZIP compression on the server
- Configure cache headers
- Remove unnecessary JavaScript
- Defer loading of non-critical resources
A performance audit is often the first step towards a website that converts better. And that's exactly what we offer in our audit service.