Why Your Website Speed is Everything in 2025

If your website is slow, forget nearly everything else. Visitors will get bored and leave. Like waiting too long for a meal, people won’t stick around—and even if they do, they likely won’t return.

What Do We Mean by Page Speed?

Simply put, page speed is how fast the content on your page loads onto a screen. Not to be confused with site speed, which is an average page speed for a sample of web pages across your site.

We describe page speed in two ways:

• Page load time – This is the time it takes to completely render the content on a page
• Time to first byte (TTFB) – This has nothing to do with breakfast and everything to do with how long it takes your web browser to receive the first byte of information from the server

So, we’ve established that your website speed is pretty high on your list of important stuff. So how do you test it, and how do you make improvements? it?

How Can I Find Out My Page Speed?

There are a lot of page speed tools offering website speed tests and performance monitoring. You can use Pingdom’s Site Speed Tools or Google’s PageSpeed Insights, which now uses updated real-user data from Chrome in 2025.

Why Is My Page Speed Important Anyway?

It’s all about visibility and where you appear on those all-important search results. Website performance relies heavily on how fast your content loads in the browser.

Humans are fickle creatures. If your web performance is poor, your user has already left to view the competition.

Google has confirmed that site speed, and by default, Google PageSpeed, is one of its core ranking factors. It’s also likely that Google continues to use time to first byte (TTFB) as a ranking signal.

Web crawlers have what’s known as a crawl budget, and slow pages mean the search engine will crawl fewer of your pages using that budget. This can hurt your overall web position.

User Experience

Even without considering your position in a search engine, websites should be built for humans. The speed of your web pages still plays a major role in overall user experience.

Data shows that pages that are slow to load have much higher bounce rates, and users spend far less time on them. Slow pages also negatively affect conversions, conversion rates, and the performance of your Google Ads campaigns.

What Are the Common Mistakes That Slow Down My Pages?

The single most impactful item on our page speed list is the size of your media upload files—video, audio, and especially images.

Other issues include:

• Themes and plugins that load unnecessary elements
• Too much code or uncompressed code
• Large JavaScript files
• Poorly configured third-party scripts

So How Can I Increase My Page Speed?

There are many things you can take care of yourself, and for the more technical issues, you can work with a reliable web developer.

Image Compression

Our first recommendation is always to get a proper SEO expert involved, as this is one of the most common problems we see. We build sites for speed, but they often become slow when users start adding their own oversized media. Here’s what I tell people:

Don’t upload images straight from your camera. I’ve seen 12MB photos on websites where they could’ve been under 150KB. Files like that will completely kill a page, especially in areas with poor broadband. And don’t forget – Google indexes mobile-first.

Use a tool like Photoshop to save images at the correct size, dimensions and quality. Free tools like GIMP exist, but we recommend spending the £8/month for Photoshop if you manage your own content.

There’s also a free online tool we like: BulkResizePhotos. It’s great for mass edits. Upload multiple images, set the max pixel width or height, and reduce the quality. In most cases, you can drop quality to 50% or lower and still have sharp, web-optimised images.

GZip Compression

Use GZip to reduce file sizes for HTML, CSS and JavaScript files over 150 bytes. You’ll need your developer to help with this.

MinifMinify JavaScript, CSS and HTML

This strips unnecessary characters like spaces and line breaks to reduce file size. It can have a noticeable impact on page speed. Again, a developer should handle this—especially on sites built with plugins or third-party themes.

Redirection

Too many redirects slow things down. The server has to wait for extra responses.

Don’t redirect deleted pages to the home page by default. Use a 410 header to tell Google to stop indexing the page. Tools like SEMrush’s site audit can help you track down and manage redirects.

Removing Render-Blocking JavaScript

These are scripts that stop the page from rendering until they’ve loaded—even if they’re not in the visible part of the screen. Waiting for content below the fold can delay page load time.

Leverage Browser Caching

Web pages load a lot of elements—images, text, stylesheets, JavaScript. Caching lets a user’s browser save these files, so it doesn’t have to reload everything on repeat visits.

Size of Database

This one gets overlooked a lot. WordPress can build up massive databases over time—especially with page builders and dynamic content.

Most users don’t know what to look for or how to clean things out, but doing so can have a big impact. A bloated database = slower performance.

Improving Server Response Time

Your server’s response speed can drop with high traffic or cheap hosting. Server response time should be under 200ms. Your hosting package plays a big part here.

Using a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

A CDN is a network of servers that host copies of your website in multiple locations. That way, your site loads from the nearest data centre to the user, speeding up delivery.

Free Website Speed Audit

We’ve made measurable improvements for clients that have directly boosted their conversion rates. Every site we build is designed with performance in mind from the start.

Want to know how your site stacks up? Get in touch with us for a free speed audit—no forms, no fluff, just honest advice from a real person.