Your site is slow — how to fix it
Speed affects both sales and rankings, and most causes are simple.
Every second of delay costs conversions, and a visitor on mobile data will not wait.
The biggest causes
- Huge images — by far number one
- Too many fonts or weights
- Third-party scripts: chat, tracking, ads
- Cheap or geographically distant hosting
- Plugin overload on WordPress
Quick wins
- Convert images to WebP and compress
- Lazy-load anything below the fold
- Remove scripts you do not actually use
- Use a CDN
Measure with PageSpeed Insights before and after. Do not chase 100 — anything above 80 is good.
Mobile first
Test on mobile, not desktop. Google ranks based on the mobile version.
Measure growth as a business result
Traffic, followers and impressions are diagnostic numbers, not the final result. Choose the event closest to revenue—qualified lead, booked appointment, completed order or repeat purchase—and make it a key event in analytics. Record the current baseline before changing the site or campaign.
Review performance by channel, landing page and customer segment. Keep tests long enough to collect a useful sample and change one major variable at a time. Growth work also needs operational follow-through: fast replies, accurate stock and a clear offer can matter more than another increase in ad spend.
- Choose one revenue-linked key event and verify that it fires.
- Record cost, qualified conversions and resulting revenue by channel.
- Change one major variable per test and write the result down.
- Check response time, stock and sales follow-up before raising spend.
A topic-specific field checklist
- Measure real templates separately; a fast home page does not prove product or article pages are fast.
- Google recommends good Core Web Vitals around LCP within 2.5 seconds, INP under 200 milliseconds and CLS at or below 0.1.
- Resize and compress images, reserve media dimensions and reduce blocking JavaScript.
- Recheck after analytics, chat and ad scripts are installed.
Details most proposals miss
Infrastructure quality appears when something changes or fails. Ownership, monitoring, recovery and controlled releases matter more than a long hosting feature table. The goal is not “never fail”; it is to reduce preventable failure and recover predictably.
- Business-owned domain, DNS, repository and production access.
- Separate development, preview and production release paths.
- Monitoring for uptime, application errors, performance and expiring services.
- Versioned backups with a tested restore objective.
- Patch and incident procedures with named responsibility.
The TechMate implementation layer
TechMate keeps the technical foundation understandable to the client. Releases have a visible history, important accounts are not trapped with one individual, and performance or security work is verified against a baseline.
- DNS and renewal inventory included in handover.
- Performance budgets for images, fonts and third-party scripts.
- Security checks aligned to actual data and privileged actions.
- Rollback route prepared before high-risk releases.
- Post-launch monitoring reviewed with business impact, not raw logs only.
Delivery phases that reduce risk
Improve infrastructure by reducing one known risk at a time and proving the control works. Configuration screenshots are not evidence of recovery, performance or security; tested outcomes are.
- Inventory assets, owners, dependencies and renewal dates.
- Capture a baseline for errors, speed and availability.
- Prioritise high-impact, likely failure modes.
- Release through preview with rollback prepared.
- Test monitoring and recovery after the change.
Questions that reveal implementation quality
- Who can recover each critical account?
- How old can restored data be?
- Which third party can block the service?
- What metric must improve after this change?
- What is the rollback trigger and procedure?
A realistic scenario
Example: the hero image is optimised, then a chat widget and three ad tags delay interaction on every page. A performance budget must include third-party scripts and be checked after marketing tools are installed.
Sources directly related to this guide
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