Website Performance Optimisation: A Practical Checklist
Most slow websites are not slow because of hosting. They are slow because of everything that was added after launch.
Why Speed Is a Business Metric
A visitor on mobile data judges your business in the first two seconds. Slow pages lose enquiries before anyone reads the offer, and they quietly reduce how much of your site search engines bother to crawl.
What Core Web Vitals Actually Measure
- Largest Contentful Paint: how long until the main thing on screen appears. Usually your hero image or headline.
- Interaction to Next Paint: how quickly the page responds when someone taps. Heavy scripts are the usual culprit.
- Cumulative Layout Shift: how much the page jumps around while loading. Images without dimensions cause most of it.
The Fixes That Matter Most
- Images. Modern formats, correct dimensions, lazy loading below the fold, one properly prioritised hero image.
- Fonts. Two families maximum, preloaded, with a sensible fallback so text is never invisible.
- Third-party scripts. Chat widgets, pixels and trackers are the biggest offenders. Audit them yearly and delay anything not needed immediately.
- Code splitting. Load each page's code when it is visited, not all of it upfront.
- Caching and compression. Cheap, invisible, and consistently effective.
- Reserve space. Set width and height on media so nothing shifts.
Test Like Your Visitors, Not Like a Developer
Test on a mid-range phone on mobile data, not a laptop on office fibre. Test the pages that earn money — home, services, contact — not just whichever page is easiest to check. Then re-test after every launch, because performance decays.
Keep It Fast After Launch
Speed is a maintenance habit, not a one-off project. That is exactly what a care plan is for, and it pairs directly with modern SEO.
Is Your Website Slower Than It Should Be?
We will run a performance check on your key pages and tell you the three fixes with the biggest impact.
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Founder of Roquepress with over a decade of hands-on experience in web development, SEO, paid advertising, and digital strategy across Singapore and Southeast Asia. He writes from direct experience — no theory, no fluff.