Test it properly first
“Website speed test” is one of the most-searched phrases about websites, and most people testing get a score they do not know how to read. Use PageSpeed Insights (free, from Google), enter the address, and look at the mobile tab, because that is where the slow experience is and where Google measures it.
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): when the main content is visible. Good is under 2.5 seconds.
- Interaction to Next Paint (INP): how quickly the page responds when tapped. Good is under 200 milliseconds.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): how much things move as the page loads. Good is under 0.1; zero is achievable.
The top of the report shows real-user data from Chrome where enough people visit; the bottom shows a lab test. The real-user data is what Google ranks on. Also load the site on your own phone on mobile data, not wi-fi, and count.
What fast actually looks like
| Site | First content painted | Full load | Requests | Layout shift |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| propavingmanchester.com | 0.56s | 0.68s | 11 | 0 |
| beds.ie (17,000 products) | 0.42s | — | — | 0 |
| cfcweddinglists.com | 0.78s | — | 30 | 0 |
| vehicles2lease.co.uk | 0.89s | — | — | 0 |
| rochsweets.com (1,000 lines) | 0.86s | 1.27s | 71 | 0 |
Source: Browser Navigation Timing, Resource Timing and Layout Instability APIs read on the live homepages, 4 September 2026. Dashes are figures not recorded in that reading.
Those are not heroic numbers. They are what happens when images are the right size, the code is lean and nothing loads that is not needed. The paving site renders with eleven requests; a page-builder WordPress site commonly makes over a hundred.
Fix 1: images, which is usually most of it
A photo straight off a phone is 3 to 6 megabytes and 4,000 pixels wide. Displayed at 800 pixels, it is downloading five times the data it shows. Eight of them on a homepage is 30 megabytes before a word is read.
- Resize to the largest size the image is displayed at. For most content images that is 1,200 to 1,600 pixels wide; for thumbnails, 400 to 600.
- Compress. Squoosh (free, in the browser) or any image tool. Aim for under 200KB per image; modern formats like WebP and AVIF halve the size again.
- On WordPress, an image optimisation plugin does this automatically on upload and converts existing images. Pick one; do not stack three.
- Lazy-load anything below the first screen, which WordPress now does by default, and never lazy-load the first-screen image.
Fix 2: remove what you do not use
Every plugin, chat widget, social feed, tracking pixel and font is code the visitor downloads. Audit them: for each one, can you say what it does for a customer? If not, remove it. Two analytics tools, a heat-map, a chat bubble and a cookie banner together often add two seconds on their own.
Fix 3: the first screen
Video backgrounds and sliders are the heaviest things on most slow sites and they sit under the text people are trying to read. A single well-compressed image and a sentence load in a fraction of the time and convert better. If you must have a video, do not auto-play it above the fold.
Fix 4: hosting, caching and a CDN
Time to first byte is how long the server takes to start responding, and cheap shared hosting is often half a second or more before anything else can happen. The paving site above answers in 51 milliseconds. Good managed hosting with page caching and a content delivery network, which serves files from a location near the visitor, fixes this without touching the site.
This is what the hosting and care fee on this site pays for, and it is why we do not put clients on the cheapest shared plan: the saving is a few pounds a month and the cost is every visitor waiting.
Fix 5: stop things jumping
Layout shift happens when an image, advert or embed loads without the browser knowing its size, so the content below it jumps. Give every image and embed fixed width and height attributes, load fonts in a way that does not swap mid-read, and do not inject banners above content after load. All five sites in the table score zero; it is a matter of care, not budget.
Fix 6: when it is the theme or the builder
If images are sized, plugins are cut, the first screen is light and the hosting is decent and the site still takes four seconds, the theme or page builder is loading its entire library on every page. This is the common fate of multipurpose themes and drag-and-drop builders. The fix is a lighter theme or a rebuild, and at that point it is worth asking whether the site needs redesigning anyway; the redesign guide sets out when it does and when it does not.
