How to Speed Up Your Website: 10 Concrete Steps

To speed up your website, start with the heaviest elements: compress and resize images, choose good hosting, and make the text that matters load fast. In practice, most slowness comes from oversized images and unnecessary scripts — and you can fix that yourself without being a developer. The rest comes down to clean code and optimizing the three Core Web Vitals that Google measures.

Below are 10 concrete steps, ordered from the simplest (do it yourself today) to the most technical (needs someone who works in the code).

Why speed matters, in short

A visitor who waits too long simply leaves. A slow site means fewer inquiries, fewer sales, and a negative signal to Google, which prefers to show fast-loading pages in results. You don't need to be the fastest site in the world — you just need to not be the slow one people give up on.

What are Core Web Vitals?

They are three measurements Google uses for real user experience:

You can check them for free on PageSpeed Insights (pagespeed.web.dev) by typing your site's address. It also gives you a concrete list of what to fix.

The 10 concrete steps

1. Resize images before uploading. The most common mistake: a 4000 px wide photo placed in a 600 px space. Crop it to its real display size before uploading. This alone can halve loading time.

2. Compress and use a modern format. Save images as WebP (or AVIF) instead of old JPG/PNG — same quality, much smaller file. Free tools: Squoosh or TinyPNG. You can do this yourself.

3. Load images "lazy". Images further down, which people only see if they scroll, don't need to load immediately. The `loading="lazy"` attribute handles this. Many WordPress themes add it automatically.

4. Choose good hosting, close to your customers. Cheap, overcrowded hosting keeps your site slow no matter how much else you optimize. For a local site, a fast server located in your region with caching makes an immediate difference. It's worth the investment.

5. Add a CDN. A CDN (Cloudflare has a free plan) copies your site to servers around the world, so every visitor gets it from nearby. It also helps with security.

6. Enable caching. Caching stores the ready-built page so the server doesn't rebuild it every time. On WordPress, a caching plugin (e.g. WP Rocket, LiteSpeed Cache) gives a visible jump. On a modern site built properly, caching is already included.

7. Drop unnecessary plugins and scripts. Every plugin, every font, every chat or tracker adds code that loads. Clean up: disable what you don't use. Clean code means less to download.

8. Load only the fonts you need. You don't need 6 font weights. Pick 2, host them locally if you can, and avoid pulling them from outside — that blocks text from showing.

9. Minify and defer scripts. Here you enter the technical zone: "minifying" strips useless spaces from the code, and deferring (`defer`) lets text appear before heavy scripts start. Caching plugins do part of this automatically; the rest needs someone who knows code.

10. Measure, fix, measure again. Run PageSpeed Insights, apply 2-3 recommendations, then check again. Speed isn't "once and done" — it's a short routine you repeat.

What you can do yourself, today

If you're not technical, tackle points 1, 2, 3, 5 and 7 — resize and compress images, add free Cloudflare, and clean up plugins. They're free and solve most problems. The rest (clean code, minifying, deferring scripts, moving hosting) needs someone who works in the code.

When it's worth calling someone in

If you've tried the steps above and PageSpeed still gives you a low score, or if the site is old and "bloated", it's often cheaper to rebuild it cleanly than to patch it endlessly. A new site, built properly from scratch, starts fast already — with us, a Landing costs between €290 and €490, and a Presentation site between €490 and €890. Speed depends a lot on how it's built from the ground up — see also how much a website costs. And if speed matters for customers in your area, it's tied to local SEO and to why you need a website.

Want to know exactly what's slowing your site down? Message us on WhatsApp at wa.me/40750257140 and we'll do a free demo, showing what you concretely need to fix.