How to Improve Website Speed: 15 Proven Techniques That Actually Work

Your Website is Probably Slower Than You Think

Here's something that might sting a little: while you're reading this, potential customers are leaving your website because it's too slow. I've seen it happen hundreds of times. A business owner shows me their "fast" website, we run it through PageSpeed Insights, and suddenly they're staring at a performance score in the 30s.

The brutal truth? Over half of your mobile visitors will bounce if your site takes more than 3 seconds to load. And Google? They've been using page speed as a ranking factor for years now. A slow site doesn't just frustrate users—it actively hurts your search visibility.

But here's the good news: most speed issues are fixable, and you don't need to be a developer to understand what's going wrong. Let's walk through the techniques that actually move the needle.

Start With Images (Seriously, This is Usually the Culprit)

I can't tell you how many times I've audited a slow website only to find that images are eating up 80% of the page weight. It's almost always the first thing I check.

Last month, I helped a photographer fix her portfolio site. Her homepage was loading a 4MB hero image—a beautiful shot, but completely unnecessary at that file size. We converted it to WebP format, resized it to match the actual display size, and compressed it. The result? That single image went from 4MB to 180KB. Same visual quality, 95% smaller file.

Here's what to do with your images:

Switch to WebP format. It's supported by all modern browsers and typically gives you 25-35% smaller files than JPEG with identical quality. If you're still using PNG for photos, you're probably wasting bandwidth.

Don't upload images larger than you need. If your hero image displays at 1200 pixels wide, don't upload a 4000-pixel original. Your CMS might resize it for display, but visitors are still downloading the full file.

Use a tool like Squoosh or TinyPNG. These can compress images dramatically without visible quality loss. I've seen 70% file size reductions that look identical to the original.

Browser Caching: Let Returning Visitors Load Faster

When someone visits your site, their browser downloads all your files—CSS, JavaScript, images, fonts. Without caching, it downloads everything again on their next visit. That's wasteful.

Proper caching tells browsers: "Hey, keep these files locally. They won't change for a while."

For static assets like images and CSS, set your cache duration to a year. Yes, a full year. When you actually need to update something, just change the filename or add a version number. Your returning visitors will thank you with faster load times.

Get a CDN (It's Easier Than You Think)

A CDN (Content Delivery Network) puts copies of your site on servers around the world. When someone in Tokyo visits your US-hosted website, they're actually loading files from a server in Asia instead of waiting for data to cross the Pacific Ocean.

Cloudflare offers a free tier that works great for most sites. Setup takes about 15 minutes. I've seen sites shave 500ms+ off their load times just by adding Cloudflare—no code changes required.

The JavaScript Problem

Modern websites love JavaScript. Sometimes a little too much.

I audited an e-commerce site last year that was loading 3MB of JavaScript on their homepage. For context, that's larger than the entire original Doom game. Most of that JavaScript wasn't even being used on the homepage—it was code for features buried deep in the checkout flow.

Code splitting is your friend here. Instead of loading all your JavaScript upfront, load only what each page needs. Most modern frameworks (React, Vue, Next.js) support this out of the box.

Also, audit your dependencies. That date-formatting library you added might be 67KB. Do you really need it, or could you use the browser's built-in Intl API? These things add up.

Lazy Loading: Don't Load What Users Can't See

Why load images at the bottom of your page before users have even started scrolling? Lazy loading defers off-screen images until users actually need them.

The good news: modern browsers support this natively. Just add loading="lazy" to your image tags. That's it. No JavaScript library needed.

Your initial page load gets faster because you're loading less stuff upfront. Users scrolling down get images just before they need them. Everyone wins.

Your Server Might Be the Bottleneck

All the frontend optimization in the world won't help if your server takes 2 seconds to respond.

Time to First Byte (TTFB) measures how long users wait for your server to start sending data. Ideally, this should be under 200 milliseconds. If yours is over 600ms, you've got a problem.

Common culprits:

Cheap shared hosting. That $5/month hosting plan is sharing resources with hundreds of other sites. When someone else's site gets traffic, yours slows down. Consider upgrading to a VPS or managed hosting.

Unoptimized database queries. If you're running WordPress or another CMS, plugins can create horrifically inefficient database queries. One poorly-written plugin can add seconds to your load time.

No server-side caching. Your server shouldn't rebuild pages from scratch for every visitor. Use caching layers like Redis or Varnish to serve pre-built pages.

Third-Party Scripts Are Probably Hurting You

Analytics. Chat widgets. Social sharing buttons. Ad networks. Marketing pixels.

Each of these adds HTTP requests, downloads JavaScript, and competes for your users' bandwidth. I've seen sites with 40+ third-party scripts, each one making the site a little slower.

Be ruthless. Do you actually use that heat-mapping tool you installed last year? Is that social share bar generating any engagement? Remove what you don't actively use.

For scripts you do need, load them asynchronously so they don't block your page from rendering. Better yet, delay them until after your main content loads.

Fonts: The Hidden Performance Killer

Custom fonts look great, but they come at a cost. Each font weight and style is a separate file. A typical "font family" might include regular, bold, italic, and bold-italic—that's four files, often 100KB+ each.

Subset your fonts. If your site is in English, you don't need characters for Cyrillic or Greek alphabets. Font subsetting can cut file sizes by 70%.

Use font-display: swap. This tells browsers to show a fallback font immediately while your custom font loads. Users see content right away instead of invisible text.

Consider system fonts. Modern system font stacks look pretty good. Sometimes the fastest font is no custom font at all.

Enable Compression (It's Free Speed)

Gzip compression shrinks text-based files during transfer. Your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript get compressed on the server and decompressed by the browser. File sizes drop by 70-90%.

Most hosting providers enable this by default, but double-check. If you're seeing uncompressed files in your browser's network tab, you're leaving easy performance gains on the table.

Brotli is even better than Gzip—about 15-25% more efficient. Most modern browsers support it, and CDNs like Cloudflare enable it automatically.

Monitor, Don't Just Fix Once

Here's a mistake I see constantly: someone optimizes their site, celebrates the improved scores, and then forgets about it. Six months later, they've added new plugins, new images, new scripts—and they're right back where they started.

Make performance testing part of your routine. Run your key pages through Lighthouse monthly. Set up alerts for when performance degrades. Catch problems before your users do.

Tools like BulkAudit let you test multiple pages at once, which is especially useful if you have a large site. You might optimize your homepage perfectly while your blog posts are still crawling.

Quick Wins If You're Short on Time

Look, I know this is a lot. If you can only do five things, do these:

Compress your images and convert to WebP. This alone might cut your page weight in half.

Enable a CDN. Cloudflare's free tier takes 15 minutes to set up.

Remove third-party scripts you don't use. Every one you delete is instant improvement.

Add lazy loading to images. One HTML attribute per image.

Check your hosting. If TTFB is over 600ms, it might be time to upgrade.

The Bottom Line

A faster website isn't just a nice-to-have anymore. It's directly tied to your search rankings, your conversion rates, and your users' perception of your brand.

Start by measuring where you are now. Run your site through BulkAudit or PageSpeed Insights to see your actual scores. Identify the biggest problems—usually images and third-party scripts—and tackle those first.

Performance optimization isn't a one-time project. It's an ongoing practice. But the payoff—better rankings, happier users, more conversions—makes it absolutely worth the effort.