How to Speed Up Your Website: A Practical Checklist

A faster website keeps visitors, converts better and is treated more favorably by search engines. The good news: most sites can get much faster with a handful of changes. Here’s the checklist, roughly in order of impact.

1. Optimize your images

Images are the single biggest cause of slow pages. Resize them to the dimensions they’re actually shown at, compress them, and use modern formats. This one step often cuts page weight dramatically.

2. Lazy-load below-the-fold media

Only load images and embeds as the user scrolls to them, so the initial view loads fast.

3. Cache aggressively

Serve static assets with long cache lifetimes and use a CDN so files load from a server near the visitor.

4. Trim third-party scripts

Every analytics, ad and widget script adds weight and can block rendering. Keep only what earns its place, and load non-essential scripts asynchronously.

5. Reserve space to avoid layout shift

Set dimensions for images and embeds so the page doesn’t jump around as it loads — jumpy layouts feel slow and frustrate users.

For why this matters beyond speed scores, see why Core Web Vitals still matter.