5 Simple Ways to Boost Your Website's Speed

A slow site loses people before they see anything. Google measures speed too and uses it when it ranks pages. Here are five fixes that make the biggest difference, in the order we usually do them.

Fast is better than slow.

Google, Ten things we know to be true

1. Make your images lighter

Images are usually the heaviest part of a page. Save them as WebP or AVIF, resize them to the size they are shown at, and load the ones further down only when the visitor scrolls to them.

2. Ask the browser for less

Every script, font and stylesheet is one more request. Remove the plugins and widgets you do not use, and load third-party scripts like chat or tracking only when they are needed.

3. Let the browser remember

Caching keeps files in the visitor's browser, so the second visit opens almost at once. Set long cache times for the images, fonts and scripts that rarely change.

4. Serve the site from close by

A CDN keeps copies of your site in data centres around the world, so each visitor gets it from the nearest one. Cloudflare, which runs our own site, does this on every plan, the free one included.

5. Keep the code lean

Minify CSS and JavaScript and remove the code no page uses. On WordPress, fewer and better plugins usually help more than any speed plugin.

How to check your speed

Run your page through PageSpeed Insights and look at the three Core Web Vitals: how fast the main content appears, how quickly the page reacts to a tap and how much the layout jumps.

• LCP, the main content: under 2.5 seconds.
• INP, the reaction to a tap or click: under 200 milliseconds.
• CLS, the layout jumping: under 0.1.

In short

A faster site keeps more visitors and helps your ranking. Start with the images, then cut what the page does not need. Want us to look at yours? A free Nimble Audit shows what slows it down.