A fast, reliable and user-friendly website is vital for attracting visitors, keeping them engaged and meeting search engine ranking criteria. In this post, we have provided a checklist of important measures that website owners can take to ensure their site gets off to a strong start in 2026.
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The basics for better performance
Core Web Vitals essentials
Google’s Core Web Vitals are not only key ranking criteria; they are also important indicators of site speed and user experience. By improving them, you can make a real difference to how quickly your website loads and responds. Here’s an overview of what they are and how to make improvements.
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) measures the time it takes for the main part of your page to load. Easy ways to improve LCP include using images with smaller file sizes, image compression and ensuring your theme loads efficiently.
- Interaction to Next Paint (INP) tracks how quickly a page responds when someone interacts with it, e.g. clicking a button. Responsiveness is improved by reducing your use of JavaScript, minifying scripts and removing unnecessary plugins or features.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures how much a page layout shifts around during loading. You can minimise shift by giving images and embedded content fixed width and height values.
Is your hosting holding you back? Read: How Hosting Choice Affects Website Performance and Core Web Vitals
Fast server response
The faster your server responds, the quicker your pages start to load. This has benefits for both user experience and ranking.
To maintain fast server response times, keep your PHP version up to date, as this can improve processing speeds, and make sure your provider supports HTTP/2, which enables browsers to load multiple files at once.
If you have a WordPress site, some WordPress Hosting plans come with the Smart PHP Updates feature that automatically applies the latest PHP versions.
Efficient code and assets
One of the easiest ways to improve performance is to make your website’s code and files as lightweight as possible. You can do this by:
- Minifying CSS and JavaScript – this reduces file size by removing unnecessary characters and spacing
- Remove old plugins, unused scripts or third-party tools that you no longer need.
- Load non-essential scripts after the main page content.
- Use lazy loading for images and videos to prevent these large files from loading until visitors scroll down to them.
Optimised media and content delivery
Smart handling of images and video
While lazy loading serves images only when needed, using responsive image settings ensures you only load the size needed. You can also serve images faster by choosing more efficient formats, like WebP, that are smaller in file size but maintain quality.
Additionally, compress all media before adding them to your site and set important visuals, like hero banners, to preload.
Caching and delivery improvements
Caching helps repeat visitors load your website faster by storing static elements in their browser. This means they do not need to download them again every time they visit. The most advanced WordPress Hosting plans include the AccelerateWP feature, which comes with static, full-page cache, mobile-optimised cache and precaching built in.
A content delivery network (CDN) can also boost loading times by storing copies of your website on servers located closer to your visitors.
Making sure your site runs well on mobile
Mobile first design principles
With most browsing now happening on smartphones and search engines prioritising sites that load quickly on mobiles, mobile performance has become increasingly important.
One way to boost mobile performance is to use a lightweight theme designed to ensure that pages load smoothly and look clean on smaller screens.
With regard to design, avoid layouts that shift during loading, ensure text can be read without zooming and check that menus are easy to understand. Additionally, make sure buttons, links and form fields are user-friendly on smaller devices.
For more information, read: Essential Design Elements for a Mobile-Friendly Website
Making your site easier for search engines to understand
Structured content and semantic clarity
Websites need to be clearly structured so that search engines and AI tools can understand their content. Today, this means using properly formatted headings (e.g. h1, h2 and h3), short sections and plain language.
You should also make sure that your HTML is well structured, for example, by using proper headings and tags, such as <header>, <nav>, <main> and <footer>.
