Website Speed: How to Make Your Site Fast

Website speed is now the #1 ranking factor in technical SEO. According to a Google study, 53% of users abandon a site if it does not load in under 3 seconds, and every extra second of delay cuts conversions by 7%. In the age of Core Web Vitals (LCP, INP, CLS), it is not enough for your site to “look fast”: it has to measure fast in Google’s official tools.

A fast site today needs to meet 3 key metrics: LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) < 2.5 sec., INP (Interaction to Next Paint) < 200ms and CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) < 0.1. You achieve them through 6 pillars: quality hosting, image optimisation (WebP/AVIF, lazy loading), caching (browser + server), code minification, a CDN, and optimised JavaScript/CSS delivery.

In this detailed guide you will learn the 12 steps to make your website fast, how to measure speed (PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, WebPageTest), the Core Web Vitals in detail, WordPress-specific optimisations and how hosting affects speed.

First, let’s look at a video about how a site can be made faster and why it does not load quickly.

So how can we make a slow website faster?

To be fast, a website first of all needs to be built properly. It should make few calls to the server so that it loads faster (it is better to load one larger file than many smaller ones, because time is lost on each request), use sprites for files such as logos, images and icons, and have minified JavaScript and CSS.

HTTP/2 and modern servers for top speeds

For years now we have had the HTTP/2 protocol, which can make your website much faster. But what is this standard, and what will it do for your website’s speed?

Compared with the traditional HTTP standard, HTTP/2 lets browsers that support it (now all of them) download a website’s elements (images, files, text etc.) at the same time, instead of waiting for one to download before starting the next ( which is how plain HTTP works).

To use HTTP/2, it has to be supported by your server and your website needs an encrypted HTTPS connection.

These are just a few of the rules for building a website  so that it is fast.

Core Web Vitals: the 3 metrics that define website speed

Since March 2024, Google has replaced FID (First Input Delay) with INP (Interaction to Next Paint) as one of the 3 main Core Web Vitals. These are the metrics Google uses for SEO ranking:

Where to check them:

• Google Search Console → Core Web Vitals report: data from real users (CrUX)
• PageSpeed Insights: Google’s official tool with detailed suggestions
• Chrome DevTools → Lighthouse — local testing
• Web Vitals Chrome Extension: real-time in your browser

The 12 steps to a fast website: summary table

Factors for a fast website

What we can do, and what to watch out for, so that our website is fast regardless of how it was built.

Images on a website

Our website needs images that are optimised in file size and not resized by the browser. On a WordPress website this can be done either with plugins such as  Smush or with tools you can find on Google, such as TinyPNG.

It is important for the images on your website to be the right size for the largest size they will be shown at, at the highest resolution. Put more simply, if the maximum width of the website is 1300 px and an image spans the page from edge to edge, the image should be 1300 pixels wide.

Website images can now use far more efficient formats than JPEG and PNG. Of the two formats that once looked promising, JPEG 2000 never caught on in browsers, while WebP, together with the newer AVIF, is supported by all modern browsers.

With modern image formats, websites perform remarkably well, especially on mobiles and tablets, and you can be rewarded in your website’s SEO.

Your web server and site speed

You bought a hosting package, either from a well-known company or from whoever built your website, and now that you are done everything should be fine. Not quite.

A website is like a living organism. As it grows in size, as its visitors increase and as its features grow (e.g. “I want to add this plugin too”), its server needs to be adjusted as well.

Each server is good for something different. For example, servers with SSD drives are good for an e-shop, but they are expensive (around 200 euros a year). Shared servers, on the other hand, are cheap but may slow your website down.

Of course, the best solution is a VPS with a large  amount of RAM and many processors, or a dedicated server, but we are talking about solutions costing thousands of euros, with performance to match.

At web-mate we have developed a hosting package for our clients, LiteSpeed Hosting, with the help of myip.gr (a Greek hosting provider)

A server’s specifications alone are not enough to give the best performance. The server also needs to be configured properly and have a fast internet connection.

Caching for better website speed

First of all, what is caching? On dynamic websites (and nowadays all websites are dynamic), the more calls we make to the database or to files on the server, the slower the server responds. So imagine 20 people visiting your website at the same time and each making 40 calls (which is very few for an ordinary website).

What we can do is create snapshots of each page of our website, so that instead of all these calls only a handful are made and our website becomes faster.

Browser caching is another mechanism, where we tell the browser that CSS and JavaScript files (and others such as images, XML etc.)  will not change for a certain period, e.g. 1 year, so it should keep them in its memory and not reload them, which saves calls to the server.

In WordPress we can use the  W3 Total Cache plugin to speed things up (be very careful with its settings, because they can have the opposite effect).

What needs care is deciding which parts of our website to cache. Should we cache the database? Should we cache every page on the site? To answer these questions we need to know the type of site and the type of server.

On an e-shop, for example, it is best not to cache the checkout and cart pages, so we do not create problems for our customers. And on low-spec servers we should avoid database caching.

CDN

A CDN, or content delivery network, is a mechanism that improves our website’s speed and also saves resources on our server and takes load off it. In essence, we give files from our website, e.g. images  or  CSS files, to many servers spread across different regions. When one of those servers is geographically closer to the visitor than ours, it is used instead, and we save both time and resources (e.g. traffic, RAM).

Many CDNs also do other jobs, such as  minification, and at web-mate we prefer Cloudflare, which even has a very good free plan.

Combine & minify CSS and JavaScript files

If your server does not support HTTP/2, a very good solution is to combine and minify your files for a fast website.

By combining and minifying, we mean making files as small as possible and merging similar ones into a single file. This saves calls to our server. The caching plugin mentioned above can do this for us. We need to be very careful, though, because problems can arise on the website when files are minified and the new files are created.

Why combine only with HTTP/1?

As mentioned above, this technique should only be used where HTTP/2 is not available. That is because, as we said, HTTP/2 lets the browser download many files at the same time. So if one large file is created for our website, it may be loaded on pages that do not need all of it. With HTTP/2 all you need is minification, and the ideal would be a very careful combine for each page.

How the website or e-shop was built

How the website was built, or the theme that was used, naturally plays the biggest part in achieving top speed for an e-shop or a website . A custom solution will always give the best possible result, which also affects your website’s search engine promotion. Below is an example of a custom theme with excellent response times:

Measure your website’s speed

There are various tools for measuring your website’s speed, but we mainly recommend one: Google’s official tool.

This is PageSpeed Insights, which gives you speed data for your page on mobile devices as well as on desktop.

The tool also makes suggestions about what you should do to get maximum speed. Of course, it is not always possible to do all of them on one website, but it is very good to do as many as you can.

At web-mate we aim for top speed results, as the image below shows

The 8 best website speed testing tools

Pro tip: Always test in incognito mode with a cleared cache and do 3-5 runs for statistically reliable results. A single test can show different numbers each time.

Speed optimisation for WordPress: 8 steps

WordPress powers 43% of the web worldwide, but a default WP install is often slow. Here are the 8 steps to a fast WordPress site:

1. Lightweight Theme: Astra, GeneratePress, Kadence (avoid heavy themes with 100+ features). Typical gain: 30-50% LCP.
2. Caching Plugin: WP Rocket (paid, the best), LiteSpeed Cache (free if you have LiteSpeed hosting), W3 Total Cache.
3. Image Optimization Plugin: ShortPixel, Smush, Imagify: automatic compression + WebP conversion.
4. CDN: Cloudflare (free), BunnyCDN (from €1/month).
5. Plugin Audit: Deactivate plugins you do not use. Every active plugin = extra HTTP requests + database queries.
6. Database Cleanup: WP-Optimize for revisions, transients and spam comments. Run it monthly.
7. Disable Heartbeat / Limit Autosaves: Reduces server load.
8. Choose WordPress-Optimized Hosting: Webmate Hosting, Kinsta, WP Engine, SiteGround or Cloudways. Generic shared hosting is not enough.

At Webmate we offer a WordPress speed optimisation service with a guaranteed PageSpeed score of 90+ on mobile and desktop. See our website development services.

Website optimisation

At web-mate we are here to help, whether with your website’s speed, promoting your website in search engines or a complete rebuild of your eshop or website.