Page Speed Optimisation: Why Fast Websites Win

In an era of instant gratification, speed is everything. Here's why it matters and what you can do about it.

The Business Case for Speed

• Amazon found that a 100ms delay costs 1% in sales
• Google found 53% of mobile visitors abandon sites taking more than 3 seconds to load
• Portent research shows conversion rates drop by an average of 4.42% per second of load time
• Page speed is a direct Google ranking factor

How Fast Is Fast Enough?

Google's targets for Core Web Vitals:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Under 2.5 seconds
• First Input Delay (FID)/INP: Under 100ms
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Under 0.1

Aim for a PageSpeed Insights score of 80+ on both mobile and desktop.

The Most Common Causes of Slow Websites

1. Unoptimised Images

Images are usually the biggest culprit. Large, uncompressed images can be 5–10x larger than necessary.

Fix:

• Compress images before uploading (tools: TinyPNG, Squoosh)
• Use modern formats like WebP
• Specify image dimensions in HTML
• Use lazy loading for images below the fold

2. Too Many Plugins (WordPress)

Every plugin adds code that must load. Deactivate and delete any plugin you don't actively need.

3. Poor Hosting

Cheap shared hosting is often the bottleneck. Upgrading to a quality managed host can dramatically improve speeds.

4. Unminified CSS and JavaScript

CSS and JS files can be 'minified' — stripped of unnecessary whitespace and comments to reduce file size.

5. No Browser Caching

Caching stores static files in visitors' browsers so they don't need to be downloaded again on repeat visits.

6. No Content Delivery Network (CDN)

A CDN serves your website files from servers closest to each visitor, reducing latency globally.

7. Render-Blocking Resources

CSS and JavaScript that must load before the page can be displayed blocks rendering. Defer non-critical scripts.

How to Check Your Speed

1. Google PageSpeed Insights (free) — pagespeed.web.dev
2. GTmetrix (free tier) — more detailed analysis
3. WebPageTest (free) — tests from real browsers worldwide

Speed Optimisation at OWD

All websites we build are speed-optimised from the ground up. We use optimised images, clean code, quality UK hosting, and follow all of Google's performance best practices.

Get a free website speed audit.