Site Speed Optimization Playbook with Auditite

Overview

Page speed is a direct ranking factor and a critical component of user experience. Slow sites lose visitors, conversions, and search visibility. This playbook walks you through a systematic approach to identifying and resolving the most common speed bottlenecks.

Step 1: Establish Your Speed Baseline

1. Test your top 20 landing pages using Auditite’s performance audit.
2. Record Time to First Byte (TTFB), First Contentful Paint (FCP), Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), and Total Blocking Time (TBT) for each.
3. Pull real-user data from Google Search Console’s Core Web Vitals report.
4. Categorize pages by template type: homepage, product, category, blog, landing page.
5. Identify which template types have the worst performance.

Step 2: Server and Hosting Optimization

Reduce TTFB

1. Enable server-side caching. Use reverse proxies like Varnish or Nginx FastCGI caching to serve cached HTML.
2. Optimize database queries. Add indexes to frequently queried columns and eliminate N+1 query patterns.
3. Use a CDN. Distribute static assets and HTML across edge locations close to your users.
4. Upgrade hosting if needed. Shared hosting often cannot sustain consistent sub-800ms TTFB under load.

Enable Compression

1. Enable Brotli compression on your server (preferred over Gzip for 15-20% smaller payloads).
2. Verify compression is working by checking Content-Encoding response headers.

Step 3: Reduce Render-Blocking Resources

1. Inline critical CSS. Extract the CSS needed for above-the-fold content and inline it in the HTML head.
2. Defer non-critical CSS. Load remaining stylesheets asynchronously using media=“print” with an onload handler.
3. Async or defer JavaScript. Add async to analytics and third-party scripts. Use defer for scripts that depend on DOM readiness.
4. Remove unused CSS and JS. Use coverage tools in Chrome DevTools to identify dead code. Tree-shake your bundles.

Step 4: Optimize Images and Media

1. Convert to modern formats. Serve WebP or AVIF with fallbacks for older browsers.
2. Implement responsive images. Use srcset and sizes attributes so browsers load appropriately sized images.
3. Lazy load below-the-fold images. Add loading=“lazy” to images that are not visible in the initial viewport.
4. Compress aggressively. Target 80-85% quality for JPEG/WebP — the visual difference is negligible but the file size savings are substantial.
5. Serve videos from a dedicated host. Self-hosted video files are large and slow. Use a video CDN or embed from a platform.

Step 5: Minimize Third-Party Impact

1. Audit all third-party scripts using Chrome DevTools Network tab.
2. Remove any scripts that are no longer needed (old tracking pixels, abandoned A/B tests).
3. Delay non-essential third-party scripts until after user interaction using facade patterns.
4. Self-host critical third-party resources (fonts, key libraries) to eliminate extra DNS lookups.

Step 6: Implement Caching Headers

1. Set Cache-Control: max-age=31536000, immutable for versioned static assets (CSS, JS, images with hashed filenames).
2. Set Cache-Control: max-age=3600 for HTML pages, or use stale-while-revalidate for dynamic content.
3. Verify caching headers are applied correctly using response header inspection.

Step 7: Monitor and Iterate

1. Set up Auditite’s continuous speed monitoring on your top 50 URLs.
2. Establish performance budgets: LCP under 2.5s, TBT under 200ms, total page weight under 1.5MB.
3. Alert on regressions so new deployments do not silently degrade performance.
4. Review speed metrics monthly and include them in your SEO reporting cadence.

Expected Outcomes

After completing this playbook, you should see:

• TTFB consistently under 800ms across all page templates
• LCP under 2.5s for at least 75% of real-user page loads
• Total page weight reduced by 30-50% from baseline
• Improved crawl efficiency as Googlebot can process more pages per crawl session