Website Loading Speed: 12 Steps That Always Work
Slow page = lost customers. A practical guide on how to achieve a Google PageSpeed score of 90+ and improve your site performance.
Author: Meiko Neuman
Founder and web strategist, Kodulehe Haldus
Why is speed important?
- Google uses speed as a ranking factor (Core Web Vitals)
- Every 1s increase in loading time reduces conversions by 7%
- 53% of mobile users leave if a page takes longer than 3 seconds to load
Measurement Tools
- PageSpeed Insights – pagespeed.web.dev (Official Google tool)
- GTmetrix – more detailed analysis
- WebPageTest – professional grade
Goal: A score of 90+ on mobile.
12 steps for a faster site
1. High-quality hosting The biggest impact. In 90% of cases, cheap shared hosting is the cause of a slow site. In Estonia: Zone.ee, Veebimajutus.ee. Abroad: SiteGround, Kinsta.
2. CDN Cloudflare is free and reduces loading times by 40–60% globally.
3. Image compression - WebP format (30–50% smaller than JPEG) - AVIF format (even better, but not supported by all browsers) - Image size = screen size (do not upload a 4000px wide image if it is displayed at 800px)
4. Lazy loading Images are only loaded when the user scrolls to them. WordPress has done this automatically since v5.5.
5. Browser caching Set Cache-Control headers so the browser does not reload the same files.
6. Gzip/Brotli compression Reduces the size of HTML, CSS, and JS by 70–80%.
7. Minify CSS/JS Removes spaces and comments. Plugin recommendation: Autoptimize.
8. Remove unused plugins Every plugin = additional code that needs to be loaded.
9. Database cleanup Revisions, spam comments, transients – all of these slow down MySQL queries.
10. Fewer fonts Each font file = 50–200KB. Use a maximum of 2 fonts and 3 weights.
11. Defer JavaScript Scripts that are not critical for the initial load should be loaded later.
12. HTTP/2 or HTTP/3 Modern servers must have at least HTTP/2 enabled.
Core Web Vitals
Google's three main metrics: - LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) – < 2.5s - CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) – < 0.1 - INP (Interaction to Next Paint) – < 200ms
Summary
Speed is not just one thing – it is 12 small things that, when combined, make a difference. Start with hosting and images – that's where the biggest gains are.
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Request a quoteAbout the author
Meiko Neuman — Founder and web strategist, Kodulehe Haldus. Meiko leads the Kodulehehaldus team and has spent over a decade helping companies maintain and optimise their websites for measurable business results. He writes about website management, SEO, AEO/GEO and the commercial side of the web.