Website speed optimisation.
Make it genuinely fast — starting with measurement, not a plugin.
Speed work usually gets approached backwards: install a caching plugin, enable every option, hope the score improves. Sometimes it does. Often it breaks the site subtly, and nobody has established what was actually slow. I start by measuring where the time goes, then fix the causes in the order that matters.
What’s included
- Performance audit with real measurement, not just a score
- Core Web Vitals: LCP, INP and CLS
- Server response time and backend query optimisation
- Caching strategy: page, object, CDN and browser
- Image optimisation, correct formats and lazy loading
- CSS and JavaScript reduction, deferral and bundling
- Font loading that does not block rendering
Score versus experience
A synthetic score is a proxy, not the goal. What matters is what your actual users experience on their actual devices and connections. I work from field data where it is available, because a site can score well in a lab test and still feel slow on a mid-range phone on mobile data.
Where the time usually goes
In my experience: slow server response caused by unoptimised database queries, oversized images served at full resolution, render-blocking CSS and JavaScript, and third-party scripts — analytics, chat widgets, ad tags — that nobody audits. That last one is frequently the biggest single win and costs nothing but a decision.
Caching without breaking things
Caching is powerful and easy to get wrong, particularly with logged-in users, carts and personalised content. The rules for what can be cached, for how long, and for whom, need to be deliberate. Done carelessly it causes bugs far harder to diagnose than the slowness it replaced.
Common questions
Can you guarantee a perfect score?
No, and I would not trust anyone who does. Some costs are structural — a third-party script your business requires, for example. I will tell you what is achievable, what it would cost, and what trade-off each option involves.
Will this affect our SEO?
Core Web Vitals are a ranking signal, so improvement helps, though content and relevance matter more. The stronger argument is conversion: slow pages lose users regardless of ranking.
Do you work on WordPress and WooCommerce?
Yes. WooCommerce in particular tends to be slow for specific, fixable reasons — uncached cart fragments, unindexed queries and plugin bloat.
What do we get at the end?
Before and after measurements, the changes made and why, and a note of anything left that would need a bigger decision.
Have a project in mind?
Tell me what you're building and roughly when you need it. I reply to every genuine enquiry within one working day.