Website loading speed and how it interacts with visitors is one of the Google ranking factors.
Achieving great Core Web Vitals is crucial for your business website. Google’s three Core Web Vitals are:
- Largest Contentful Paint “LCP”: How quickly the biggest image or text block in view finishes loading after the user clicks the link. Good is 2.5 seconds or less.
- Interaction to Next Paint “INP”: How fast the page reacts when someone clicks, taps or types (it replaced First Input Delay in 2024). Good is under 200 ms.
- Cumulative Layout Shift “CLS”: How much the layout jumps around while the page loads. Good is below 0.1.
First Contentful Paint (FCP), the moment the first content shows up, isn’t a Core Web Vital, but PageSpeed Insights still reports it and it helps your overall score.
As you can see below, in our earlier tests we hit a score of 100 on desktop and 90 on mobile in PageSpeed Insights metrics. To achieve similar results, follow the same approaches we did below.
1. Change Your Web Hosting Provider
The web hosting service of your website is responsible for the majority of your website’s speed and performance. We explain why in how web hosting affects website performance.
Back in the day, we used DreamHost shared hosting. It wasn’t bad, but we wanted more performance.
So we switched to Cloudways and set up a DigitalOcean server on it, a cloud VPS. (Cloudways has been owned by DigitalOcean since 2022.) Here’s our full Cloudways review.
- Beginner? Create a DigitalOcean server on Cloudways from $11/month, with unlimited websites.
- Not beginner? Go to DigitalOcean directly and get a 1 GB server for $6/month (droplets start at $4/month).
2. Use a Lightweight Theme
The theme organizes the layout of your website. It holds a lot of HTML, CSS, and JS files.
If your website’s theme is heavy and not well-optimized, you will face speed issues. Therefore, we use the Blocksy theme.
Blocksy is a lightweight theme with lots of features, even in the free version.
There are more light-speed-optimized themes such as:
- Kadence.
- GeneratePress.
- Astra.
- Neve.
To install the Free version in your WP dashboard, go to Appearance > Themes > Add New. Next, search Blocksy, install, and activate it.
3. Replace Google Fonts With System Fonts
Google Fonts takes time to load their fonts on your site. Therefore, instead, you can use the System fonts.
To switch to a System font, click on Customize to open the theme customization.
In the Customizer, open Typography. Then click on the System Default under the Base Font to select a font.
The first ones are usually the system fonts, the fonts that you want to use. Select any of them and hit Publish.
You can distinguish between them by the sign with each font’s name. If it’s “S”, then it’s a system font, and if it’s “G”, then it’s a Google font.
Set the rest of the font options to match the Base Font by clicking on each option and choosing the first option “Default“. This includes all Heading tags, Header, Footer, Titles, etc.
4. Optimize Your Images
Basically, you can do two things to optimize your images:
- First: Convert all your images (PNGs and JPGs) to WebP format as Google recommends. This will make the images web-friendly and drastically reduce the size of the images. Our free WebP converter does it right in your browser, with no upload.
- Second: You can reduce image sizes even more with the help of a WP optimization plugin.
This can be done by using a WordPress optimization plugin, there are plenty of them such as Imagify, EWWW, and ShortPixel. Anyone can get the job done.
5. Some Minor Optimization
- Make the layout of your site simple and clean.
- Remove deactivated and unnecessary plugins.
- Delete installed but not active themes.
- Remove all other caching plugins and use only Breeze Cache, the free caching plugin by Cloudways.
- Do database optimization.
See also:
Our Toolkit.
Recommended Services.
