Website speed and PageSpeed

Your site is there, but it takes too long to open on a phone. Images appear in pieces, buttons move as you try to tap them, and people arriving from Google leave before they’ve even read what you offer. A slow site loses visitors, and with them enquiries and sales.

We measure what is really slowing your site down, using PageSpeed Insights and real user data, and fix it at the source: images, code, plugins and server. At the end you get a report with the before and after figures.

When you need it

• Your site is slow on mobile and customers are calling less.
• PageSpeed Insights shows you red or orange numbers.
• Search Console flags pages with “poor” Core Web Vitals.
• You have a WordPress site built with a page builder and lots of plugins.
• You run ad campaigns and pay for clicks from people who leave before the page loads.
• The site slowed down after the last update or after new features were added.

How we work

1. Baseline measurement. We record PageSpeed scores and real user data on the pages that matter most.
2. Diagnosis. We find out what’s weighing the site down: images, fonts, third-party scripts, plugins, theme or server.
3. Working copy and backup. We work on a copy of the site, so your live site keeps running.
4. Optimisation. We convert images to modern formats, delay loading anything that isn’t needed straight away, remove unused code and set up caching.
5. Checks. We test pages, forms and payments on phones and computers before publishing.
6. Before/after report. We send you the figures side by side and a list of what we changed.

What we measure

Google measures speed with three metrics called Core Web Vitals. They sound like technical jargon, but they describe things anyone notices when using a website.

LCP (Largest Contentful Paint): how long it takes for the main element of the page to appear, usually the large photo or the headline. It’s the feeling that the page “has opened”.

INP (Interaction to Next Paint): how long the site takes to respond when you tap a button or open a menu. If it’s high, you tap, nothing happens, and you tap again.

CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift): how much the content moves around while the page loads. It’s why you sometimes hit the wrong button because a banner popped up at the last moment.

We look at both the PageSpeed Insights lab score and the data Google collects from real users, because the first helps us find problems and the second tells us what your customers actually experience.

A real example

The Athena SCF website was built with WordPress, Elementor and WooCommerce: slow and packed with plugins. In that case optimising wasn’t enough, so we proposed rebuilding it in Astro. Today the pages are static (ready-made, with no processing on each visit) and are served in a few milliseconds, at the same addresses as before.

You don’t always need to go that far. The first step is finding out whether your site can be rescued, and we tell you with the numbers.

Who it’s for

Anyone who already has a website and doesn’t want to rebuild it: local businesses, online shops, professional practices, hotels and guesthouses that take bookings through their site. If you’d like an overall picture first, ask for the free audit.