Making a Website Faster — The Order That Actually Helps
Five measures sorted by impact per effort. What you can do yourself, what needs a developer, and which tips are a waste of time.
There is endless advice on speed. The problem is rarely that nobody does anything, it is that people start in the wrong place. Here is the order by impact per effort.
1. Images, and genuinely all of them
In nine cases out of ten this is the answer. A photo straight from a camera is several megabytes and several thousand pixels wide. On the page it is displayed at 800 pixels. All the rest is pure waiting time.
Scale to the size the image is actually shown at and save as WebP. For most sites that settles eighty percent of the problem.
There are websites whose homepage loads more data in a minute than a feature film. It is almost always images.
2. Remove everything that is not used
Extensions, fonts in five weights, a map service on every subpage, a chat window nobody has ever used. Every element costs load time, even when it is invisible. The question is not whether it does harm, but whether it has a measurable benefit.
3. Serve fonts yourself
External fonts mean an additional connection to a third party server before the first letter appears. Served yourself, that disappears. In Germany there is a data protection aspect on top.
4. Enable caching
A returning visitor does not have to load everything again. Two lines of server configuration or one hosting setting handle it. Effort: small. Effect: noticeable on every second visit.
5. Only then think about the server
A faster hosting package helps, but only once the first four points are done. A fast server delivering a 6 megabyte image delivers a 6 megabyte image.
What you can ignore
Chasing a score of 100 in testing tools. What matters is how the page feels to real visitors, not a number in a lab.
If you like, we will measure your site and tell you which of the five points gives you the most.
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