Website Speed Optimisation
What we've learned so far
Speed is one of the few technical properties with a direct line to revenue. Slow pages lose visitors before anything renders, and the effect is heaviest on mobile and on poor connections, which is where most of your traffic is. Performance also determines cost: work done inefficiently at scale is paid for in infrastructure every month, and in advertising spend on visits that never became sessions.
It has to be done against the right target. Scores and experience are different things, and optimising for the score is the standard mistake. We have improved a site's measured numbers noticeably while the moment users actually waited for stayed exactly as slow, because the metric captured first paint and the customer was waiting for a price. We identify what the user is waiting for, then measure that. The other truth is that most of the weight on a commercial site is not the site. It is tags, chat widgets, review scripts and personalisation tools, each added by someone with a reason and none owned afterwards. A serious performance engagement therefore includes a commercial conversation about what gets removed, and without it the gains are handed back by the next marketing integration within a quarter.
Machine traffic is now a majority of requests on much of the web, and the crawlers reading your site for AI answers are impatient and often work without JavaScript. Performance has quietly become a discoverability issue as well as a conversion one. Diagnosis is easier than it has ever been, since tooling will happily list every opportunity. Deciding which three matter for your business, and which vendor relationship has to change to achieve them, is the part that still requires someone to take a position.
What this can involve
Site Speed Optimisation
Core Web Vitals Audit
Core Web Vitals Optimisation
How we work
Measure what real users get
Field data from actual visitors on their actual devices and connections, rather than a lab score run on a fast machine in an empty browser.
Find out what wrong with the page
The usual suspects are: oversized images, render-blocking scripts, third-party tags and whatever the last agency left behind. We identify which ones matter on which templates.
Fix the heaviest causes first
The changes that move the numbers on the pages that carry revenue, starting with the ones that need no redesign.
Deal with the third parties
Tags, chat widgets and tracking scripts are frequently the largest single cost, and the conversation is about which ones are worth what they take.
Keep it from creeping back
Budgets and checks in the build process, because performance degrades one feature at a time unless something is watching.
Where this isn't the right fit
If the site is slow because of where it is hosted or how the platform works, optimisation buys you a little and then stops. That is an infrastructure or platform decision, and it is cheaper to have it than to keep tuning around it.
If you want a specific score for a report rather than a faster site for customers, we are the wrong people. The two are related but they are not the same thing, and chasing the number produces changes that look good in a test and do nothing at the checkout. And if the site is being rebuilt shortly, wait and build it fast rather than paying twice.
