(And as a bonus\u2026 speeding up your site can also reduce your bounce rate<\/a>, lead to more repeat traffic, and even boost your bottom line!)<\/p>\n The good news? This guide is PACKED with actionable page speed optimization tips you can implement TODAY.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s dive straight in.<\/p>\n The speed at which a webpage loads has a major impact on how both crawlers and users interact with the page<\/strong><\/span>.<\/p>\n A slower page load will result in a higher bounce rate and fewer conversions for your users. This is especially true for mobile users or those with worse internet connections, since slow load times have the biggest impact on these groups.<\/p>\n And when it comes to crawlers, a slower loading speed can have a negative impact on indexing<\/a> too. This is true for both regular search engine crawlers<\/a> (SEO) as well as for LLMs<\/a> like ChatGPT<\/a> (so-called \u201cGenerative Engine Optimization\u201d (GEO)).<\/p>\n Needless to say, a good page speed is vital to the health of your website.\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n Before starting optimization, you\u2019ll need a baseline.<\/p>\n And while there are several cool tools for measuring page speed \u2014 shoutouts to GTMetrix and Pingdom \u2014 Google\u2019s own PageSpeed Insights<\/a> has everything you need to measure current performance.<\/p>\n PageSpeed Insights has a load of useful metrics. But let\u2019s keep things simple. What you want to note is:<\/p>\n Note<\/strong>: we recommend focusing on mobile page speed as Google uses <\/em>mobile-first indexing<\/em><\/a>, and using the Core Web Vitals report if it shows for your benchmark.<\/em><\/p>\n For example, the Seobility home page<\/a> currently has a mobile speed score of 82\u2026<\/p>\n \u2026a Largest Contentful Paint of 4.1s and an Interaction to Next Paint of 175 ms.<\/p>\n In case you\u2019re wondering, it could use some improvement, and we\u2019re working on it!<\/p>\n So what IS a good speed score?<\/p>\n In general, you want to aim for a score of between 90 and 100.<\/p>\n That\u2019s what Google counts as good.<\/p>\n For INP, 200 ms or below is considered good, with 200-500 ms meaning it needs improvement and anything above 500ms being considered poor.<\/p>\n For LCP, aim for under 2.5s.<\/p>\n There\u2019s a lot more to say about this topic, though.<\/p>\n Check out our post on how fast your website should load<\/a> for a more detailed look at this topic.<\/p>\n Before we get to the tips, let\u2019s quickly cover what we\u2019re trying to achieve.<\/p>\n In a nutshell:<\/p>\n Every action we take to improve page speed is designed to do one of the following:<\/p>\n And every tip below hits on one of these goals.<\/p>\n So let\u2019s press on\u2026<\/p>\n Note: This section mainly covers on-page and basic technical steps you can take to speed up your site. If you want to go even further, check out our guide on optimizing your server and infrastructure<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n In this section, we\u2019re going to cover 12 speed-boosting tips for your website, from setting up page caching to optimizing images, scripts, styles, and more.<\/p>\n Difficulty<\/strong>: Easy to intermediate (for most CMS systems this can be handled with a plugin)<\/p>\n Dynamic websites work by storing content (an article, a product, etc.) in a database (separate from the main template) and then creating a full page \u201con the fly\u201d when a user visits.<\/p>\n But fetching content from a database for every visitor is an extremely resource-heavy operation.<\/p>\n Page caching<\/a> fixes this problem.<\/p>\n Caching creates a copy of the full page (i.e., template with content) the first time it is rendered and stores it on the local disk of the server. This cached version can be retrieved hundreds of times faster than if it were fetched from the database and rendered each time the page is loaded.<\/p>\n The cache is refreshed periodically, typically every few hours. Which ensures a good balance between having the latest content and optimal page-loading speed.<\/p>\n On most CMS systems, you\u2019ll want to let a plugin (or app) handle caching for you.<\/p>\n If you\u2019re running WordPress, we recommend WP Rocket<\/a>, which can also take care of lots of other page speed optimization tips on our list.<\/p>\n But there are also free plugins such as W3 Total cache<\/a>.<\/p>\n You\u2019ve also got plenty of choices on Shopify. For example, HyperSpeed<\/a> is a good all-round page speed app.<\/p>\n Search for reviews of caching (and page speed) plugins for your chosen CMS.<\/p>\n Difficulty<\/strong>: Easy (most image editing programs can optimize for web + lazy loading is becoming native)<\/p>\n Images can help your website stand out from the crowd, make your content easier to scan (by breaking it up), and reduce bounce rate<\/a>.<\/p>\n At Seobility, we create custom featured images for each of our blog posts.<\/p>\n But when not optimized, they can also seriously slow down your site.<\/p>\n First, make sure your images are lazy-loaded<\/strong><\/span>. This is a feature where images are loaded ONLY when the user is about to see them (for example, when they are about to scroll that image into view).<\/p>\n If you\u2019re running WordPress, then as long as you\u2019re on version v5.4 or above (which everyone should be), lazy loading is built in. And as of v6.3+, smarter lazy loading functionality was added. So there\u2019s not much to do in this case.<\/p>\n On other CMSs or fully custom-built websites, you might need to use a plugin or ask a developer to help you set it up.<\/p>\n Secondly, you need to make sure that the images you are using are optimized for the web<\/strong><\/span>.<\/p>\n Usually, this means that they are saved in a format that reduces their size without losing any of their quality.<\/p>\n There are several tools that can help you with this.<\/p>\n You can save images for the Web with most graphic design tools, such as Photoshop (below). Or you can use a tool such as TinyPNG<\/a> to optimize images individually.<\/p>\n And if you want to handle image optimization directly on WordPress, you can use a service such as WPMU\u2019s Smush<\/a>, or Imagify<\/a>.<\/p>\n Difficulty<\/strong>: Intermediate (converting images to WebP is easy, but serving them will take a little tweaking)<\/p>\n We know that we need to optimize images. But what image format is a good compromise between quality and size?<\/p>\n PageSpeed Insights recommends WebP<\/a>. This is a lossless<\/em> image format that has been designed specifically for the web.<\/p>\n What does lossless mean?<\/p>\n Formats such as JPG typically \u201close\u201d some of the image quality to make their file sizes smaller. Lossless image formats such as PNG and WebP do not compromise quality for size.<\/p>\n Plugins such as Imagify (mentioned above) or WebP Express can convert your media to WebP, then use this format for displaying images.<\/p>\n You can also use this free tool<\/a> to convert your images to WebP manually.<\/p>\n Further reading<\/strong>: A new image format for the Web<\/a> (Google Developers)<\/em><\/p>\n Difficulty<\/strong>: Easy (a small tweak to config)<\/p>\n Much of a website\u2019s content is textual. For example, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are all text.<\/p>\n This gives us an easy performance win. Because textual content is highly compressible.<\/p>\n And when content is compressed, there is less of it to transfer, making it significantly faster to load.<\/p>\n Note<\/em><\/strong>: while there is a small impact of compressing and decompressing content, there is a much larger benefit to reducing the transfer size.<\/em><\/p>\n Enabling GZip<\/a> compression can typically be done through your hosting service. On cPanel-based hosts, you need to find the Optimize Website section and enable it as below.<\/p>\n Alternatively, you can add a short code snippet to your .htaccess<\/a> file as seen below:<\/p>\n Once you\u2019re done, you can check if all pages are using it correctly<\/strong> by running a Website Audit in Seobility<\/a>. You can find this info in the \u201cPages without compression\u201d report.<\/p>\n Seobility > Website Audit > Reports<\/em><\/p>\n Alternatively, you can use our free SEO Checker<\/a> to check this for individual pages only.<\/p>\n Difficulty<\/strong>: Intermediate (easy to do, but make sure you test afterwards to ensure everything is working correctly)<\/p>\n Comments, new lines, tabs, and other whitespace can be removed from JS, CSS, and HTML files to reduce their size.<\/p>\n You can use this free tool<\/a> to minify your CSS, JS, and HTML.<\/p>\n (And if you screw something up, you can also use the tool to \u201cbeautify,\u201d i.e., unminify your scripts.)<\/p>\n If you\u2019re unsure which files require optimization, Seobility\u2019s Website Audit will help you identify large files on your website:<\/p>\n Seobility > Website Audit > Reports > Issues with file sources > Filter for: Large file size<\/em><\/p>\n Further reading<\/strong>: Why Minify JavaScript Code?<\/a> (Cloudflare)<\/em><\/p>\n Difficulty<\/strong>: Easy (can be handled by a plugin or by manually adding an attribute to scripts)<\/p>\n JavaScript<\/b> libraries are typically included in the header of a page. And by default, when a browser reaches a script, it will need to download the file and \u201cparse\u201d it before continuing to load other content.<\/p>\n This is known as render blocking<\/strong><\/span>, and can seriously slow down your website.<\/p>\n Fortunately, it\u2019s easy to fix. And we\u2019ve covered exactly how to do it in our Core Web Vitals guide here<\/a>.<\/p>\n Difficulty<\/strong>: Intermediate (slightly trickier than deferring JavaScript)<\/p>\n Like JavaScript, CSS is render-blocking.<\/p>\n To improve loading speed, you can move the most important CSS (the styles required to render above the fold<\/a> content) directly into the page\u2019s HTML code and defer loading the rest until later.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not quite as straightforward as deferring JavaScript (unless you\u2019re using a plugin), but it\u2019s still relatively painless.<\/p>\n This web.dev<\/a> guide covers the process of deferring non-critical CSS in detail.<\/p>\n And we also cover how to do it in our Core Web Vitals guide<\/a>.<\/p>\n Difficulty<\/strong>: Advanced (combine many tips in this guide + analyze individual requests)<\/p>\n What\u2019s the golden rule for making a website load faster?<\/p>\n Make the size of each page as small as possible.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n To truly achieve good results, you need to obsess about this and follow as many of the steps in this guide as possible.<\/p>\n Your goal is simple. The smaller each page is, the faster it is to load \u2013 so focus on making it as small as possible.<\/p>\n A good goal is less than 1MB<\/strong><\/span>, but this may vary for different sites. Just focus on making it as small as possible without affecting user experience.<\/p>\n Beyond following the steps in this guide, you should look at everything<\/em> your page is loading (requests).<\/p>\n You can use Seobility\u2019s Website Audit feature<\/a> to scan your website for HTML pages that are overly large:<\/p>\n Seobility > Website Audit > Reports<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n If you find any large pages, GTMetrix<\/a> can then let you analyze all requests a web page is making.<\/p>\n Look at each single request<\/strong>. Try to discover its source.<\/p>\n Then ask the following question:<\/p>\n \u201cCan my website live without this request? Is it really necessary?\u201d<\/p>\n You\u2019ll find that you can eliminate many of them.<\/p>\n Here are some examples of requests that could be removed if you\u2019re not using them:<\/p>\n You\u2019ll probably discover, as you go through them, that some requests are larger (and slower) than others.<\/p>\n Make a judgment on whether you can drop them.<\/p>\n Difficulty<\/strong>: Easy to intermediate (simple to do with a plugin, more advanced if you\u2019re doing it manually)<\/p>\n While you can control the cache expiry of local scripts (i.e., the time before a browser has to download a new version), external scripts are out of your control.<\/p>\n For example, Google Analytics has a cache expiry of just two hours.<\/p>\n And you\u2019re also relying on the speed\/reliability of the external server. Not too much of a concern for most popular scripts, granted, but hey, even Google goes down from time to time<\/a>.<\/p>\n Technically all you need to do is go to the script, grab the code, save a copy, upload it to your own server, then call that local copy in your HTML.<\/p>\n But of course, the external script might change from time to time.<\/p>\n So you\u2019ll want to set up a cron job<\/a> to pull down the latest version of the script periodically (here\u2019s how to do it for Google Analytics)<\/a>.<\/p>\n Or if you\u2019re running WordPress, you can either use this free plugin<\/a> or let WP Rocket handle it for you.<\/p>\n Difficulty<\/strong>: Advanced (fixing errors may involve changing underlying code)<\/p>\n Sometimes your website might be \u201cstruggling\u201d without you knowing it. Most sites are built to be resilient to certain errors, and these errors are silently hidden.<\/p>\n But what\u2019s the effect of these hidden errors?<\/p>\n Poor performance. This is because error handling is resource intensive<\/strong><\/span>.<\/p>\n If these errors are generated often, then your site could be taking several performance hits.<\/p>\n Errors will vary from site to site.<\/p>\n So you\u2019ll need to go through the areas where errors are being logged to find the issues on yours.<\/p>\n You can check in the following places:<\/p>\n When you discover errors, investigate further and take steps to fix them.<\/p>\n Difficulty<\/strong>: Advanced (time-delaying scripts can affect performance\/tracking)<\/p>\n Even if third-party scripts can be heavy, some of them are essential for our website. So we can\u2019t eliminate them completely.<\/p>\n But can we improve page speed while retaining these scripts?<\/p>\n Yes, through a method called time-delayed loading<\/strong><\/span>.<\/p>\n You can delay loading of third-party script<\/a> through JavaScript (requires development and tweaking of your theme) or through Google Tag Manager<\/a>.<\/p>\n Make sure to test these changes thoroughly in staging, along with making sure tracking, etc., still works as intended, before going live.<\/p>\n Difficulty<\/strong>: Intermediate (relatively easy to implement by adding the relevant tags to your code)<\/p>\n Today\u2019s browsers typically load content and 3rd-party scripts from top to bottom as they encounter them.<\/p>\n But wouldn\u2019t it be great if the browser knew what it would need to load further down the page?<\/p>\nWhy page speed optimization is so important<\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n
How to check your page speed<\/strong><\/h2>\n
\n
![\"pagespeed](\"https:\/\/www.seobility.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/pagespeed-insights-seobility.png\")
<\/p>\n![\"Contentful](\"https:\/\/www.seobility.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/Contentful-Paint.png\")
<\/p>\nThe basic principles of improving page speed<\/h2>\n
\n
Technical and on-page tips for boosting page speed<\/h2>\n
1. Set up page caching<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Why should you do it?<\/strong><\/h4>\n
![\"uncached](\"https:\/\/www.seobility.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/uncached_workflow.png\")
<\/p>\nHow to do it<\/strong><\/h3>\n
![\"wp](\"https:\/\/www.seobility.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/wp-rocket.png\")
<\/p>\n2. Optimize your images and lazy-load them<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Why should you do it?<\/strong><\/h4>\n
![\"custom](\"https:\/\/www.seobility.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/custom-featured-image-1.png\")
<\/p>\nHow to do it<\/strong><\/h4>\n
![\"optimizing](\"https:\/\/www.seobility.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/technical-2-optimize.png\")
<\/p>\n3. Use next-gen formats such as WebP<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Why should you do it?<\/strong><\/h4>\n
How to do it<\/strong><\/h4>\n
![\"convert](\"https:\/\/www.seobility.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/convert-to-webp.png\")
<\/p>\n4. Enable GZip compression<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Why should you do it?<\/strong><\/h4>\n
How to do it<\/strong><\/h4>\n
![\"gzip](\"https:\/\/www.seobility.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/gzip.png\")
<\/p>\n<IfModule mod_deflate.c>\r\n\r\n# Enable compression for common content types\r\nAddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text\/html\r\nAddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text\/plain\r\nAddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text\/xml\r\nAddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text\/css\r\nAddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text\/javascript\r\nAddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application\/javascript\r\nAddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application\/json\r\nAddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application\/xml\r\nAddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application\/xhtml+xml\r\nAddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application\/rss+xml\r\nAddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image\/svg+xml\r\n\r\n# Optional: Handle old browser bugs (safe for compatibility)\r\n\r\nBrowserMatch ^Mozilla\/4 gzip-only-text\/html\r\nBrowserMatch ^Mozilla\/4\\.0[678] no-gzip\r\nBrowserMatch \\bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text\/html\r\nHeader append Vary User-Agent\r\n<\/IfModule><\/pre>\n
![\"Website](\"https:\/\/www.seobility.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/Website-Audit-in-Seobility.png\")
<\/p>\n5. Minify your JS, CSS, and HTML<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Why should you do it?<\/strong><\/h4>\n
How to do it<\/strong><\/h4>\n
![\"minify](\"https:\/\/www.seobility.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/technical-7-minify.png\")
<\/p>\n![\"identify](\"https:\/\/www.seobility.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/identify-large-files.png\")
<\/p>\n6. Defer parsing of JavaScript<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Why should you do it?<\/strong><\/h4>\n
7. Defer non-critical CSS<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Why should you do it?<\/strong><\/h4>\n
How to do it<\/strong><\/h4>\n
8. Reduce overall web page size<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Why should you do it?<\/strong><\/h4>\n
How to do it<\/strong><\/h4>\n
![\"Seobilitys](\"https:\/\/www.seobility.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/Seobilitys-Website-Audit-report.png\")
<\/p>\n![\"requests\"](\"https:\/\/www.seobility.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/request.png\")
<\/p>\n\n
9. Host a local version of scripts you can\u2019t eliminate (such as Google Analytics)<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Why should you do it?<\/strong><\/h4>\n
How to do it<\/strong><\/h4>\n
![\"host](\"https:\/\/www.seobility.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/technical-11-ganalytics.png\")
<\/p>\n10. Check and fix errors in error logs<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Why should you do it?<\/strong><\/h4>\n
How to do it<\/strong><\/h4>\n
\n
11. Time delay third-party scripts with Google Tag Manager or Lazy Load<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Why should you do it?<\/strong><\/h4>\n
How to do it<\/strong><\/h4>\n
![\"time](\"https:\/\/www.seobility.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/technical-16-time-delay.png\")
<\/p>\n12. Use Prefetch\/Preconnect to \u201cwarm up\u201d connections<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Why should you do it?<\/strong><\/h4>\n