Website Speed Optimization

An e-commerce brand came to us with a Shopify store that loaded in 5.1 seconds on mobile. Their Google Lighthouse score was 34. Their Core Web Vitals in Search Console showed red across the board -- LCP at 6.8 seconds, CLS at 0.42, INP at 380ms. They were failing every metric Google uses to evaluate page experience, and their organic traffic had declined 23% over six months while competitors with faster sites moved up. We did not rebuild their store. We optimized what they had. We replaced their 2.4MB hero image with a properly sized, WebP-compressed version at 180KB. We lazy-loaded all images below the fold. We deferred 340KB of JavaScript that was blocking render -- analytics scripts, chat widgets, and social media embeds that did not need to load before the page was visible. We moved their fonts to a CDN and implemented font-display: swap so text rendered immediately instead of waiting for custom fonts to download. We eliminated a layout shift caused by an ad banner that loaded 2 seconds after the page and pushed all content down by 120 pixels. Total development time: 22 hours. Their Lighthouse score went from 34 to 91. Mobile load time dropped from 5.1 seconds to 1.3 seconds. All three Core Web Vitals moved to green in Search Console within 28 days. Their organic traffic reversed its decline within two months and was up 18% within four months. Speed optimization is the highest-ROI technical investment most businesses can make, and it is dramatically undervalued because the damage is invisible. You never see the visitors who left because your page took too long to load -- they just disappear from your analytics as a bounce. You never see the Google ranking positions you lost because your Core Web Vitals failed -- they just slowly decline while faster competitors climb. But the numbers are well-documented: Amazon found that every 100ms of latency cost them 1% in sales. Google found that a page loading in 5 seconds has a 90% higher bounce rate than one loading in 1 second. Portent found that conversion rates drop by an average of 4.42% for each additional second of load time between 0-5 seconds. We optimize across every platform -- WordPress, Shopify, custom builds, Next.js, and legacy systems. The specific techniques depend on your stack, but the diagnostic process is universal: measure, identify bottlenecks, fix the biggest impact items first, and validate the improvement with both lab data (Lighthouse) and field data (Chrome User Experience Report).