How to Get Started Optimizing Your Website for Performance

Your website’s performance isn’t just about speed - it’s about user experience, SEO rankings, and conversion rates. Even a one-second delay in page load time can lead to significant drop-offs in engagement, revenue, and trust.

Yet many clients I work with find themselves in a familiar position: they’ve run a Lighthouse test, maybe installed a caching plugin or two, but performance still falls short - especially when it comes to Core Web Vitals.

So where do you start when you actually want results?

Here’s the approach I use when conducting performance audits that go beyond surface-level fixes.

Why Website Performance Matters

Before we dive into the how, let’s quickly talk about the why.

• SEO Rankings: Google now factors Core Web Vitals directly into its ranking algorithm. A slow, janky site can cost you valuable search visibility.
• Conversion Rates: Faster sites consistently convert better. A 100ms improvement in load time can boost conversions by 1% or more.
• User Experience: Performance is UX. Users expect pages to load in under 2 seconds. Anything more feels broken.

Put simply: performance is a revenue lever. But optimizing for it takes more than just chasing a Lighthouse score.

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1. Start With a Real Performance Audit

Tools like PageSpeed Insights and WebPageTest are useful, but to make real improvements, you need to:

• Analyze both mobile and desktop performance
• Profile time-to-first-byte (TTFB), Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), and Total Blocking Time (TBT)
• Audit third-party scripts, fonts, and unnecessary payloads
• Review backend response times and bottlenecks

A true audit goes from the CDN edge to the database - and everywhere in between.

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2. Reduce Frontend Bloat (Especially JavaScript)

Modern frontend frameworks are powerful - but they often come with a performance tax.

• Audit your JavaScript bundle size
• Defer or lazy load non-critical scripts
• Remove unused dependencies and third-party integrations
• Prefer server-side rendering or static site generation where possible

In many cases, moving away from a JavaScript-heavy SPA to a hybrid or static-first architecture yields immediate wins in LCP and interactivity.

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3. Leverage the Edge (CDNs Are Your Friend)

One of the fastest ways to improve performance globally is by pushing content closer to your users.

• Use Cloudflare or similar for edge caching, DDoS protection, and compression
• Cache HTML at the edge for high-traffic, low-change pages
• Implement image resizing/CDN-level optimization on-the-fly
• Leverage edge workers to reduce round-trips to origin

With intelligent edge logic, you can offload more work from your servers and get pages into users’ hands faster.

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4. Optimize Server Configuration & Caching Strategy

Speed doesn’t stop at the frontend. Backend bottlenecks can tank TTFB and kill performance - even with a fast frontend.

• Use full-page caching where applicable
• Cache API responses intelligently (Redis, CDN, or application-level)
• Optimize database queries and indexing
• Consider edge database options or read replicas for scale

The trick isn’t to cache everything, but to cache intelligently - based on usage patterns and data volatility.

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5. Image and Asset Optimization

This is low-hanging fruit that still catches a lot of teams out.

• Use modern formats like WebP and AVIF
• Compress images server-side
• Lazy load below-the-fold assets
• Eliminate render-blocking resources

Also, ensure your CSS and JS are minified and split into critical and non-critical paths.

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6. Security and SEO: Performance’s Unsung Heroes

A secure, well-structured site loads faster and ranks better.

• Use HTTP/2 or HTTP/3
• Enforce HSTS and other best practices
• Avoid redirect chains
• Use semantic HTML and structured metadata for SEO

It’s all interconnected - security, performance, and search visibility go hand in hand.

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7. Monitor, Iterate, Improve

Performance isn’t a one-time project. It’s a moving target.

• Set up performance monitoring (e.g. Real User Monitoring, SpeedCurve, or Cloudflare Analytics)
• Track Core Web Vitals over time
• A/B test changes to ensure real-world impact

What works in a test environment might not translate to users on slow 3G connections.

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Why Most Sites Struggle to Improve Core Web Vitals

Even when clients want to improve performance, many fail to make meaningful gains.

Why?

• It’s cross-disciplinary: Requires frontend, backend, DevOps, and UX alignment
• Fixes can be architectural, not superficial
• It’s hard to know what actually moves the needle
• Trade-offs are real: Faster performance might mean less animation, fewer third-party plugins, or backend refactoring

This is why so many performance gains stall out at the “good enough” stage. Real improvement takes strategy, expertise, and execution.

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Final Thoughts

If your site feels sluggish, underperforms in SEO, or just doesn’t feel as fast as it should, performance optimization is likely your best ROI lever.

But remember: slapping on a CDN or tweaking one plugin won’t solve deep performance issues. You need a full-stack, systems-level approach that considers everything from browser rendering to database latency.

That’s where I come in.

With over 20 years of experience - from startups to multi-nationals - I help teams build fast, secure, and scalable web platforms. My performance audits aren’t just reports - they’re roadmaps for measurable improvement.

[Get in touch] to book your website performance audit.