5 page speed fixes you can ship before lunch

Slow pages hurt in three ways simultaneously: lower rankings, higher bounce rates, and lower conversion rates. A 1-second improvement in load time has been shown to increase conversions by 7% on average. Here are 5 fixes you can implement today — no developer required.

1. Enable compression (5 minutes) Gzip or Brotli compression reduces HTML, CSS, and JavaScript file sizes by 60–80%. If you're on a managed host (Vercel, Netlify, Cloudflare Pages), this is already on. If you're on a VPS, add gzip on; to your nginx config or enable it in Apache's .htaccess.

2. Serve images in WebP (20 minutes) WebP is 25–35% smaller than JPEG at the same visual quality. Most CMS plugins (Smush, ShortPixel for WordPress; Cloudflare Image Resizing) convert automatically. If you're on a static site, use a build-step tool like sharp or Next.js Image component.

3. Add lazy loading to images below the fold (10 minutes) Add loading="lazy" to every img tag that isn't in the first visible screen. This is a single HTML attribute. It tells the browser not to load these images until the user scrolls near them. Cuts initial page weight by 30–60% on image-heavy pages.

4. Move third-party scripts to load asynchronously (15 minutes) Analytics, chat widgets, and marketing tags that load synchronously in your HTML head block everything else from rendering. Add async or defer attribute to each script tag. Exception: scripts that must run before page paint (rare — only tracking pixels that fire immediately on load).

5. Set cache headers for static assets (10 minutes) Tell browsers to cache your CSS, JS, and image files for 1 year. Add Cache-Control: public, max-age=31536000 to your server response headers for static files. On Vercel or Netlify, add this to your framework config or headers file.

How to measure the impact: After implementing, test with Google PageSpeed Insights (free). Run it three times and average the scores — PageSpeed scores can vary by 5–10 points naturally. Most sites see a 15–30 point score improvement from these five fixes alone.

Which fix to do first: If your LCP is over 4 seconds, start with the preload tag for your hero image (covered in the LCP fix guide). If your Total Blocking Time is high, start with fix #4 (async scripts). If your page is simply heavy, fix #2 and #3 first.

Run a free RankyPulse audit to see your current Core Web Vitals scores and identify which of these five fixes will have the most impact on your specific site.