Performance clean-up
Slow pages frustrate people on phones and patchy connections. A performance clean-up finds what makes your pages heavy and removes or replaces it, without changing how the site looks.
Short answer
We measure your current speed, find the heaviest images, scripts, fonts and plugins, fix them in order of impact and measure again. Results are reported against Google's Core Web Vitals thresholds, with the caveat that field data takes weeks to update.
Why older sites get slow
Websites rarely start slow. They get slow over time. Each new feature adds a script. Each new photo goes up straight from a camera at several megabytes. A chat widget, a booking tool, two analytics tags and a social media feed later, the home page asks the visitor's phone to download and run far more than it needs. Older themes and page builders add their own weight, loading code for every possible feature on every page.
A clean-up works through that build-up methodically.
How speed is measured
We use Google's Core Web Vitals as the main yardstick because they are documented, public and focused on what visitors notice. The three measures and their "good" thresholds are1:
| Measure | Good when | What a visitor notices |
|---|---|---|
| Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) | Under 2.5 seconds | The main picture or heading turns up fast |
| Interaction to Next Paint (INP) | Under 200 milliseconds | Buttons and menus react without a lag |
| Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) | 0.1 or lower | Text stays put instead of jumping as things load |
Google assesses these at the 75th percentile of page loads, separately for mobile and desktop1. That means three in four visits need to meet the threshold, not just the average one.
There are two kinds of data. Lab data comes from a test run on demand and is useful for finding problems. Field data comes from real visitors' browsers and is what counts in the end, but it builds up over weeks. We report both and explain which is which.
Where the weight usually comes from
Images
Images are often the single biggest saving. We resize them to the largest size they actually display at, convert them to modern formats, add width and height so the page does not jump while they load and lazy-load images further down the page.
Scripts and third-party tools
We list every script the site loads and what it is for. Some are no longer used. Some load on every page when they are needed on one. Some can be replaced with lighter alternatives. We remove or defer what we can, with your agreement on anything that affects marketing or tracking.
Fonts
Custom fonts can delay text from appearing. We cut unused weights, host fonts on your own domain where licences allow and set them to show text straight away while the font loads.
Plugins and themes
On WordPress and similar platforms, plugins are a frequent cause of slow pages. We review each plugin, remove the ones that are unused or duplicated and check whether the theme loads code it does not need. If the theme itself is the bottleneck, a WordPress redesign deals with it at the root.
Server and caching
We check that pages are compressed, that static files are cached by browsers and that the server responds promptly. If hosting is the bottleneck, we explain what we found. Choosing a host is your decision.
What we do not do
We do not chase a perfect score on a testing tool at the cost of features you need. A booking widget that adds some weight but brings in bookings is worth keeping. We also do not use tricks that make test tools report better figures without making the site faster for real people.
We will not tell you that faster pages will raise your search rankings by a particular amount. Speed is one of many factors, and the honest benefit is that visitors are less likely to give up waiting.
How we work
- Record lab and field figures for your key page types.
- List what each page loads, by size and by type.
- Agree the fixes, in order of impact and risk.
- Make the changes on staging and test that nothing breaks.
- Put the changes live and record lab figures straight away.
- Check field data again after it has had time to update.
What you receive
- A before-and-after report for each key page type
- A list of every script and plugin, with what we kept, changed or removed and why
- Guidance for your team on adding images and tools without undoing the work
Speed questions
How long until the Core Web Vitals report shows the change?
Field data is gathered from real visits over a rolling period, so it takes several weeks to reflect changes fully. Lab tests show the difference straight away.
Will removing scripts break our tracking?
Not if it is planned properly. We list every tracking script, confirm with you which are still in use and test that the ones you keep still record correctly.
Is our hosting the problem?
Sometimes. If the server is slow to respond, no amount of front-end work will fully fix it. We measure server response time separately so you can see whether hosting is part of the issue.
Sources
Each source was opened and checked against the sentence it supports on 3 November 2026.
- Web Vitals Platform documentation
Ready to plan your redesign?
Tell us what your current site does well and what holds it back. You get a written, fixed quote in NZD before any work starts.