How to Improve Website Speed
Work top-down. The first three items usually deliver more than everything else combined.
Test Your Website Speed →The checklist
- Caching — full-page cache at the server or CDN, so most requests never touch the application.
- Compression — brotli or gzip for HTML, CSS and JS.
- Images — modern formats, correct dimensions, lazy loading, explicit width and height to avoid layout shift.
- Fonts — two families at most,
font-display: swap, self-hosted and preloaded. - JavaScript — defer non-critical scripts, remove unused libraries.
- CSS — inline what's needed for the first screen, load the rest asynchronously.
- Hosting — adequate CPU, current runtime versions, a location near your audience.
- Redirects — remove chains; each hop is a wasted round trip.
Measure before and after
Record TTFB, page weight and request count before you change anything, and re-test after each change. Otherwise you cannot tell which change helped.