How to Speed Up Your Website — 5 Steps You Can Do in an Evening

A slow site loses people quietly. Take longer than a couple of seconds to load, and some visitors leave before it appears — and you won't even see it in your stats.

Good news: most of the time a site is slowed down not by "complex scripts" but by heavy images. And that gets fixed in an evening — no rewriting code, no developer. Here are five steps, in order.

Step 1. Measure before you fix

Don't guess — measure. Open the free PageSpeed Insights (pagespeed.web.dev), paste your site's address, hit "Analyze."

One number matters most — LCP (Largest Contentful Paint): how many seconds until the largest element of the page shows up. Good is under 2.5 seconds. Then scroll down: the tool spells out exactly what's slowing you. Write the number down now — you'll compare at the end.

Step 2. Compress your images

This is almost always the main culprit. A phone photo weighs 4–8 megabytes, while the page would do fine with 200 kilobytes — a difference of dozens of times.

What to do:

1. Open Squoosh (squoosh.app) — free, right in your browser.
2. Drag an image in.
3. On the right, pick the WebP format — it's lighter than regular JPEG at the same quality.
4. Slide the quality toward 75–80%: you won't tell the difference by eye, but the weight drops sharply.
5. Download and replace the file on your site.

Do this for every large image. This one step often cuts load time in half.

Step 3. Add lazy loading

By default the browser fetches all images at once — even the ones way down the page that a visitor might never reach. "Lazy loading" delays them until the person actually scrolls there.

It's done with one word in the image tag:

<img src="photo.webp" loading="lazy" alt="description">

Add loading="lazy" to every image except the very first one (that one you want shown immediately). In most site builders this is a "lazy load" checkbox in the image settings.

Step 4. Put your site behind a CDN

A CDN is a network of servers worldwide that keeps copies of your site closer to each visitor. Someone in Almaty gets the page from a nearby server instead of from halfway around the planet. How it works under the hood is in the breakdown on what a CDN is.

Good news: usually there's nothing to wire up by hand. Modern hosts (Vercel, Netlify, Cloudflare Pages) serve your site through a CDN automatically. If yours doesn't, Cloudflare's free plan turns on in five minutes and closes this step.

Step 5. Re-measure — and here's what you'll get

Go back to PageSpeed Insights and run the site again. Compare LCP with the number from step 1.

What you usually see after compressing images and adding lazy loading: time-to-content drops by 1.5–2x, the score climbs out of the red into the green, and the page noticeably "wakes up" on a phone. Without a single line of new logic — you just stopped making the browser haul extra weight. By the way, speed counts for search too: a fast site ranks higher — that's part of what SEO is.

Why is my site still slow after compressing images?

Then the culprit is something else. Common causes: heavy third-party scripts (chats, analytics, widgets), an oversized font file, or slow hosting. Go back to the PageSpeed report from step 1 — it lists problems in order of importance. Fix top to bottom.

Does site speed affect Google rankings?

Yes. Speed is one ranking factor, and a slow site also loses visitors before they see anything. But first the site has to make it into the index at all — that's covered separately: why your site isn't showing in Google.