Free Website Speed Audit: What We Check and What We Almost Always Find

“My site looks good, but it feels slow” is one of the most common complaints we hear — and they’re almost always right, even if they don’t know exactly why. Here’s what we check in a speed audit, and what we almost always find.

What we actually measure

This isn’t a subjective impression of “it feels slow.” We use the same metrics Google uses to evaluate your site’s experience — the Core Web Vitals:

• Initial load speed: how long it takes for the page’s main content to appear
• Interactivity: how long the site takes to respond when someone clicks something
• Visual stability: whether page elements “jump around” while loading (one of the most frustrating issues for users, and one of the most common)

The problems we almost always find

Unoptimized images. By far the most common cause of slowness. Photos uploaded straight from a camera or phone, without compressing or resizing, can weigh 10 to 20 times more than necessary to look just as good on screen.

Too many third-party scripts. Every social media button, chat widget, tracking pixel, or external widget adds weight and load time. Many sites accumulate tools over time without ever checking which ones are still needed.

Hosting that’s not enough for the site. A cheap shared hosting plan can be enough for a simple site, but quickly falls short if the site grows or gets traffic from ad campaigns.

Unnecessary code loading on every page. Platforms like WordPress, with lots of accumulated plugins, tend to load code that isn’t used on most pages — every active plugin adds weight, whether or not you need it on that specific page.

Why this matters more than it seems

It’s not just an abstract technical issue. Google uses speed as a ranking factor — a slow site has a real SEO disadvantage compared to a fast one, no matter how good the content is. And on the user side, every extra second of load time reduces the odds someone sticks around to see what you offer, especially on mobile. Studies from Google and Deloitte show that every 0.1 second improvement in load time can lift conversions by up to 8% in e-commerce — speed optimization is often one of the highest-ROI investments in digital marketing.

How the audit works

We check your site with the same tools Google uses (Lighthouse, PageSpeed Insights, and manual code analysis), identify the specific — not generic — issues, and hand you a clear report of what’s affecting speed and what can be done about it, with or without us. The full process follows four steps:

1. Audit and diagnosis. Lighthouse, WebPageTest, and Chrome DevTools across multiple devices and connections, to map every issue with its estimated impact on the score.
2. Prioritization. We order changes by impact vs. effort. Quick wins (compression, lazy loading, caching) go first — usually implemented in 2 to 5 days with immediate impact. Deeper structural changes (code splitting, architecture) get planned separately and can take 2 to 4 weeks.
3. Implementation and testing. Every optimization is applied in staging first and measured individually, to confirm it actually moves the metric it was meant to move.
4. Verification and monitoring. We validate the result with the same tools from the initial diagnosis and leave alerts active to catch performance regressions down the line.

Real results, not just the score

Across the optimization projects we completed in the last 12 months, here’s what we measured on average:

• +40 points average improvement in Lighthouse Performance score.
• -60% reduction in load time (LCP) versus the initial state.
• 100/100 on Core Web Vitals for sites that go through the full process.
• +25% improvement in conversion rate directly attributable to the higher speed.

If you’ve never formally checked how fast your site loads, it’s a good free starting point before any other investment in digital marketing — there’s no point sending paid traffic to a site people abandon before it finishes loading. If you want us to dig into yours, speed optimization is part of our Web Development service — book a free session and we’ll take a look together.

Cover photo: Bibek ghosh / Pexels