How fast does your website load? Website speed is one of Google’s factors in rankings, and here at Tobstar we help to make sites load faster.
Website speed and performance is an important factor to consider when promoting your website, because user experience and usabilities can depend on the speed of website loading. You may be surprised that an increase in website speed will actually have an effect on your sales and may further engage your users, increase return of visitors and improve conversations.
Google’s algorithm also includes page speed as a factor to be measured. This is one of the many factors that affect on Google ranking, but it does not significantly contribute to Google rankings. Google also include a factor for mobile pages to be measured and whether they are mobile friendly and whether this is fast and responsive.
There is an additional level of coding, optimising and server configuring to improve your website speed, starting with:
- Avoid redirects
- Optimise your website’s images
- Minify all Javascript, CSS and HTML files (resources)
- Reduce number of resources requests and remove query strings on the resources
- Enable compression and leverage browser caching on the server
- Eliminate render-blocking Javascript & CSS in above-the-fold content
- WordPress plugins to include WP Super Cache and Autoptimize
- Reduce number of plugins or remove unused plugins
- Remove unused resources
Overall the speed performance can contribute to improve or weaken your conversation rate, every second you saved on load time can gain the user or customer’s confidence and trust in your website and this will help them speak positively about your website. If your website is loading slowly and costing your conversations, contact us to discuss further optimising your website speed and performance.
UPDATE 2026 — What Has Changed
This article was written in 2017 and the core advice still holds, but a lot has changed in the last nine years. Here's what's new and what we do differently today.
Google now measures real-world speed, not just lab scores
Back in 2017, page speed was measured by running a test and getting a score. Google has since introduced Core Web Vitals, which measure how your site actually performs for real visitors using Chrome browser data collected over a 28-day period. A good PageSpeed score doesn't automatically mean you pass.
The three metrics Google measures are:
LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) — how long it takes for the main content of a page to appear on screen. Target is under 2.5 seconds.
CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) — whether elements on the page jump around as it loads. A shifting layout is frustrating for users and penalised by Google. Target is under 0.1.
INP (Interaction to Next Paint) — how quickly the page responds when a user clicks or taps something. Target is under 200ms. This replaced FID (First Input Delay) in 2024.
Desktop and mobile are measured separately. It's common to pass on desktop and fail on mobile, which is exactly what we see on many WordPress and WooCommerce sites.
WP Super Cache has been superseded
In 2017 we recommended WP Super Cache and Autoptimize. These plugins still work but most sites we build and manage today use LiteSpeed Cache, which is built specifically for LiteSpeed servers and handles full page caching, image optimisation, CSS and JS minification, and lazy loading in a single plugin. For sites hosted on our servers, this is now our default setup.
Images are the biggest performance issue on most sites
Image optimisation was on the list in 2017 but it has become far more important. The modern standard is WebP format, which is typically 25 to 35 percent smaller than JPEG at the same visual quality. Most browsers have supported WebP since 2020.
Two things that weren't common practice in 2017 but matter a lot now:
Images need explicit width and height attributes set in the HTML. Without them, the browser doesn't know how much space to reserve before the image loads, which causes layout shift (CLS).
Hero and banner images above the fold should not be lazy loaded. Lazy loading tells the browser to wait before loading an image until it's needed, which is great for images further down the page but actively slows down the first thing a visitor sees.
Crawl budget matters for larger sites
This is less about raw speed and more about how Google interacts with your site, but it's worth covering here. Google has a crawl budget, meaning it only visits a set number of pages per day before moving on. For WooCommerce stores in particular, WordPress can generate thousands of auto-created URLs for product variations, colour and material tags, attribute archives, and paginated pages. Google ends up spending its budget crawling pages that will never rank for anything.
Cleaning up your sitemap and using noindex on these auto-generated pages is one of the most effective things you can do to help Google focus on your real content. We cover this as part of our SEO audits.
How we check performance today
In 2017 the go-to tools were PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix. Both are still useful but we now use them alongside Google Search Console's Core Web Vitals report, which shows real field data from actual visitors rather than a synthetic lab test. The two often tell different stories.
For a full picture we look at both.
Speed test tools (still relevant in 2026):
Google Search Console Core Web Vitals
If your site is slow on mobile or failing Core Web Vitals, get in touch and we'll take a look.
Useful links:
10 Ways to Speed Up Your Website – and Improve Conversion by 7%
