Option 1: Do it yourself
Follow the steps in this guide. Free, and typically 30 minutes to a few hours of careful work.
Option 2: Just contact us
Skip every step below. $49/mo and it is sorted, or WhatsApp us right now.
Last updated: August 2026
What the work actually involves
Audit and baseline. Real measurement of your key pages, not just the homepage, on mobile, with Core Web Vitals recorded so improvement is provable rather than claimed.
Images. Compression, correct dimensions, WebP conversion and lazy loading. Usually the single biggest win and typically half the total improvement on business sites.
Caching. Page caching, browser caching, and object caching with Redis for database-heavy sites and stores.
Database. Removing years of revisions, expired sessions, spam and orphaned tables from deleted plugins.
Code delivery. Deferring render-blocking scripts, generating critical CSS, optimizing fonts and cleaning up redirect chains. This is the delicate part and where careless services break sites.
Third-party scripts. Auditing chat widgets, pixels, heatmaps and embeds, each of which taxes every page load.
Hosting. If time to first byte stays high after the above, the server is the bottleneck and no further plugin tuning helps.
How to judge a speed service before hiring
Ask for before-and-after numbers from real client sites, including mobile Core Web Vitals rather than a desktop score. Ask what they will change and how they avoid breaking things, and listen for the word staging. Ask whether checkout and forms are excluded from aggressive optimization, which is the single most common way stores get broken by well-meaning speed work. And ask what happens in month three, because speed decays.
One-time project or ongoing
A one-time optimization is right when your site was fast, got slow, and the causes are accumulated neglect. Expect the gains to erode over six to twelve months as new images, plugins and database growth pile up.
Ongoing optimization suits sites that publish, sell or change regularly, which is most businesses. Our Growth plan includes speed and Core Web Vitals work monthly, with before-and-after numbers in the report, because a number that is only true on the day of handover is a receipt rather than a result.
What you can do yourself first
Genuinely a lot: image compression, a caching plugin, a current PHP version and a database cleanup will take most neglected sites halfway there in an afternoon, using our free speed guide. Hire someone for the parts that break sites: render-blocking optimization, critical CSS, store-specific tuning and hosting decisions.
What good results look like
Under 2.5 seconds for largest contentful paint on mobile is the passing benchmark, under 2 seconds is comfortable, and stores should target under 2 seconds on product pages because checkout completion measurably degrades beyond that. Be sceptical of anyone selling a "100 PageSpeed score" as the goal; a perfect score with broken functionality is a worse outcome than an 85 that sells.
FAQ
Will speed optimization improve my Google rankings? Directly through Core Web Vitals and indirectly through visitor behavior. It is rarely the only thing holding a site back, but it is nearly always one of them.
Can optimization break my website? Aggressive minification and script combination can, particularly with page builders and stores. That is why staging and checkout exclusions matter.
How long does the work take? A focused optimization is one to three days for a standard site, longer for large stores.
Why did my site get slow again after paying for optimization? Speed decay: new images, new plugins, database growth. That is the entire argument for monthly rather than one-time work.
You do not have to do any of this yourself
Skip the steps above. Our engineers handle security, updates, speed, backups and fixes for you, with a 12-minute average response and a 99.99% uptime target.