Speed Optimisation
A slow site loses visitors before they ever see what you sell. It also costs you in search, because Google measures real loading performance and uses it.
Most speed work sold online is installing a caching plugin and sending you a screenshot of a score. That helps, but it treats the symptom. The interesting question is why the site is slow underneath the cache, because a cache only hides the problem from some of your visitors.
What Actually Gets Measured
Google looks at three things, taken from real visits rather than a test tool:
- LCP – how long until the main thing on the page appears. Usually your header image or hero text
- CLS – how much the page jumps about while loading. The reason you tap the wrong link on a phone
- INP – how quickly the page responds when someone taps or clicks
A site can score well in a speed test and still fail these, because the test runs on a fast connection with an empty cache and no advertising scripts. Real visitors are on phones, on mobile data, with everything loading at once.
Where The Time Usually Goes
Images
The most common single cause. A 4000 pixel photograph straight off a camera, scaled down in the browser to 400 pixels, still downloads at full size. Converting to WebP and serving the right dimensions often halves page weight on its own.
Too many plugins doing too much
Every plugin adds CSS and JavaScript to every page, whether that page uses it or not. A contact form plugin loading its scripts on all two hundred pages is normal and wasteful.
Database bloat
This one gets missed almost every time and it can be severe. On one site I worked on, a background scheduling table had grown to five million rows in two days because a plugin was logging every task it ran. The site was crawling and nothing on the front end explained why. Clearing that table and stopping the logging fixed it.
Post revisions, expired transients, spam comments and abandoned plugin tables all do the same thing more slowly.
Hosting
Cheap shared hosting puts hundreds of sites on one server. If someone else on that box has a busy afternoon, your site slows down and nothing in your control fixes it. Sometimes the honest answer to a speed problem is that the hosting is the problem.
Caching set up badly or not at all
Caching is genuinely worth doing. It also breaks baskets, checkouts and logged-in pages when configured carelessly, which is why some people turn it off and never go back.
How I Work
I measure first, on a real page and note what the numbers are before anything changes. Then I work through the causes in order of how much time each is costing, largest first.
Changes get made one at a time with a measurement after each, so there is evidence of what helped rather than a pile of tweaks and a hope. Anything that risks the checkout or a form gets tested properly before it stays.
At the end you get the before and after figures and a plain explanation of what made the difference.
What It Costs
- Businesses – £150 per hour, one hour minimum
- Private individuals – £120 per hour, one hour minimum
- After the first hour, charged in half hours
Most sites see the bulk of the gain in the first two or three hours, because a handful of causes account for most of the delay. I will tell you when further work stops being worth paying for.
What I Cannot Promise
Anyone who guarantees you a perfect score is selling you something. Scores move with the tools that measure them and some sites carry weight that cannot be removed without changing what the site does. Booking systems, live chat, maps and tracking scripts all cost speed and you may well want to keep them.
What I will tell you is exactly what is slowing your site, what each item costs you in loading time and which ones are worth fixing.
What I Need To Get Started
- Your website address
- WordPress admin login
- Hosting login if you have it
- Which pages matter most to you commercially
Who I Work With
Private customers and small to medium sized businesses. That is the work I am set up for and the work I am good at.
I do not take on corporate contracts. Development teams, sign-off processes and layers of project management are a different job to this one. If that is what you need, I am not the right person and I would rather tell you now than find out halfway through.