Is your website fast enough? A simple performance audit

Website speed is not a vanity metric. Slow sites lose visitors, rank worse and convert less. The good news is that a short, focused audit usually finds a handful of fixable problems.

**Measure from where users are.** A speed test from your own laptop tells you about your laptop. Test from several locations and on a throttled mobile connection, because that is what many visitors experience.

**Watch the four numbers that matter.** Time to first byte (how long your server takes to respond), Largest Contentful Paint (when the main content appears), Cumulative Layout Shift (how much the page jumps), and Total Blocking Time (how long the page ignores input). These map directly to how fast the site feels.

**Look for the usual culprits:**

- **Unoptimised images.** Oversized images are the most common cause of slow pages. Serve modern formats and the size actually needed. - **Render-blocking resources.** Stylesheets and scripts in the head that must load before anything shows. - **No caching.** Both server-side caching of dynamic pages and correct browser cache headers for static files. - **Slow server response.** If time to first byte is high, the problem is your backend or host, not the front end.

**Fix server-side first if TTFB is high.** No amount of front-end work fixes a slow origin. If your host cannot respond quickly, no other optimisation will save you.

Run the audit, fix the top two issues, then re-measure. Performance work compounds — the first fixes are usually the biggest and easiest.