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How to improve your website speed - tips for faster site performance

Natalie Nabi Profile Image
Natalie Nabi | October 22, 2024 |
Conversion Rate
| 4 min read

Your site is slower than you think

Most marketing teams don't check page speed until something breaks - a campaign underperforms, bounce rates spike, or someone finally runs a Lighthouse audit and sees a score in the 40s. By then you've been bleeding conversions for months.

Google's data is clear: when load time goes from 1 second to 3 seconds, bounce probability jumps 32%. At 5 seconds it hits 90%. Every millisecond you add is money you lose. Here are nine fixes ranked by impact, all doable in a week.

1. Compress and convert your images

Images account for roughly 50% of page weight on most sites. A single uncompressed hero image can be 3-4MB. That's insane when WebP delivers the same visual quality at 25-30% the file size of JPEG.

What to do:

  • Convert all images to WebP. If you need PNG transparency, use WebP with alpha channel support.
  • Set maximum dimensions. No image displayed at 600px wide should be uploaded at 4000px.
  • Use tools like Squoosh, Sharp, or ImageOptim for batch compression.

ConversionWax handles this automatically - when you upload image variants for personalization, the platform converts to WebP and serves the correct size per viewport breakpoint. You get optimized delivery without touching an image editor.

2. Serve assets from a CDN

If your images and scripts load from a single origin server in Virginia, visitors in London and Sydney are waiting for packets to cross oceans. A CDN caches your assets on edge servers worldwide, cutting latency to single-digit milliseconds for most visitors.

What to do:

  • Put static assets (images, CSS, JS, fonts) behind a CDN. Cloudflare's free tier covers most small-to-mid sites.
  • Set cache headers properly. Static assets should cache for at least 30 days.
  • Use cache-busting via file hashes in filenames so updates propagate immediately.

ConversionWax serves all personalized images via CDN with sub-1ms response times. When you swap a hero image based on visitor location or UTM source, the replacement loads from the nearest edge node - not your origin server. No speed penalty for personalization.

3. Lazy-load below-the-fold content

Your browser doesn't need to load 47 images before the visitor scrolls past the hero. Lazy loading defers offscreen images and videos until the user actually needs them, which means your above-the-fold content renders faster.

What to do:

  • Add loading="lazy" to all img tags below the fold. Native browser support is universal now.
  • Do NOT lazy-load your hero image or LCP element - that slows down the metric that matters most.
  • For videos, use preload="none" and load the player on interaction.

4. Eliminate render-blocking resources

CSS and JavaScript files in the <head> block page rendering until they download and parse. If you have 8 separate CSS files and 12 JS scripts, the browser stalls on every one before painting anything.

What to do:

  • Inline critical CSS (the styles needed for above-the-fold content) and load the rest asynchronously.
  • Add defer or async to non-critical script tags.
  • Concatenate and minify CSS/JS files. Going from 12 files to 2 reduces both HTTP overhead and parse time.

5. Cut your third-party scripts

Marketing stacks accumulate scripts like barnacles. Analytics, heatmaps, chat widgets, retargeting pixels, tag managers loading other tag managers. Each one adds DNS lookups, TCP connections, and JavaScript execution time.

What to do:

  • Audit every third-party script. If nobody can explain what it does or when it was last checked, remove it.
  • Load non-essential scripts after page interaction (scroll, click) instead of on page load.
  • Use a tag manager, but keep it lean. A tag manager with 40 tags is worse than no tag manager at all.

This is one reason ConversionWax was built as a lightweight script - it doesn't add page weight when personalizing. The swap happens at the CDN/asset level, not by injecting heavy client-side code that competes with your other scripts.

6. Reduce server response time

Time to First Byte (TTFB) measures how long the server takes to start sending data. If your TTFB is over 600ms, no amount of front-end optimization will save you.

What to do:

  • If you're on shared hosting and your TTFB exceeds 500ms, upgrade. A basic VPS on Hetzner or DigitalOcean costs $5-10/month and cuts TTFB in half.
  • Enable server-side caching (Redis, Varnish, or your framework's built-in cache).
  • Check your database queries. A slow product listing page is almost always a missing index or an N+1 query.

7. Minimize redirects

Every redirect adds a full round-trip to the server. A chain of 3 redirects (http to https, non-www to www, old URL to new URL) can add 600-1000ms before the page even starts loading.

What to do:

  • Audit redirects with Screaming Frog or a similar crawler. Fix redirect chains so every URL resolves in one hop.
  • Update internal links to point to final destinations, not intermediate URLs.
  • When restructuring URLs, update your sitemap and canonical tags at the same time.

8. Optimize web fonts

Custom fonts are one of the sneakiest performance killers. A single font family with 4 weights can add 400KB+ and cause Flash of Invisible Text (FOIT) while the fonts download.

What to do:

  • Subset your fonts. If you only use Latin characters, don't load Cyrillic and Greek glyphs.
  • Use font-display: swap so text renders immediately with a fallback font while the custom font loads.
  • Self-host fonts instead of loading from Google Fonts. One fewer DNS lookup, and you control the cache headers.
  • Limit to 2 font families maximum. Every additional family adds load time with diminishing design returns.

9. Monitor continuously, not once

Speed degrades over time. A developer adds a library, marketing installs a new pixel, someone uploads a 5MB PNG. Without monitoring, you won't catch it until the damage is done.

What to do:

  • Set up automated Lighthouse CI or SpeedCurve to run on every deploy.
  • Track Core Web Vitals (LCP, FID/INP, CLS) in Google Search Console - these directly affect rankings.
  • Set performance budgets. Example: "No page over 1.5MB total weight. No LCP over 2.5s." Fail the build if the budget breaks.

Pick your biggest bottleneck first

Run PageSpeed Insights on your highest-traffic page right now. Look at the "Opportunities" section. That's your list, sorted by estimated time savings.

For most sites, the answer is images. They're the heaviest assets and the easiest to fix. If you're already personalizing visuals for different audiences, ConversionWax eliminates the optimization step entirely - every variant ships in WebP at the right dimensions for the visitor's viewport, served from a CDN edge node. No speed tradeoff for relevance.

Fix the biggest leak. Measure the improvement. Move to the next one.

ADDING REGIONAL SITE IMAGES WAXES YOUR FUNNELS AND DRIVES CONVERSIONS

Without spending a dime on more site traffic, you can generate upto 30% more conversions.