LIDWAX.
All articles
Process & Tech/Performance

Website Speed Optimization in 2026: A Practical Playbook

Cut your LCP in half this week. The exact 14-step audit we run on every client site, with copy-paste fixes for images, fonts, JS bundles and hosting.

WalidApril 12, 2026 11 min read

Speed is a ranking factor, a conversion factor, and an ad-spend efficiency factor. Most sites can cut LCP in half in a single afternoon. Here is the order of operations.

The 14-step audit

  1. 01Run PageSpeed Insights on top 3 templates (mobile + desktop).
  2. 02Convert all hero images to WebP/AVIF, served at correct DPR.
  3. 03Add explicit width/height to every img tag.
  4. 04Preload the hero image and one critical font.
  5. 05Self-host fonts. Drop Google Fonts external request.
  6. 06Subset fonts to the actual character set you ship.
  7. 07Defer non-critical JS. Inline critical CSS.
  8. 08Code-split routes (Vite/Next handle this if you let them).
  9. 09Audit third-party scripts. Kill anything below 0.5% utility.
  10. 10Move analytics to a server-side tag where possible.
  11. 11Enable Brotli on your CDN.
  12. 12Set long cache-control on hashed assets.
  13. 13Migrate to an edge host (Vercel, Cloudflare, Netlify).
  14. 14Re-measure with WebPageTest from a real US metro.

Keep reading