The Small Business Owner’s Guide to a Faster WordPress Site (with your New Knowledge Centre)

This guide is written specifically for my clients, the business owners for whom I, as ‘The Knowledge Centre Guy’, have built a Knowledge Centre to increase leads, sales, and simplify the selling process. This document is the logical next step, designed to help you apply the same principles of high performance to your entire website.

Now that your new Knowledge Centre is live, it’s worth highlighting that we built it from the ground up to be exceptionally fast, setting a new performance benchmark for your online presence.

The launch of a fast new section of a site often raises the natural next question: “This is great, but how can we make the rest of our WordPress site quicker?”

While I don’t offer WordPress speed optimisation as a service, I can provide something just as valuable. Consider this guide, and me, as an independent ‘second set of eyes’ on your website’s performance.

The goal is to supplement your relationship with your current WordPress specialist, not replace it. 

This guide provides objective advice directly from Google’s own tools, empowering you to effectively manage the improvement process. 

With this knowledge, you can have more informed, data-driven conversations with your developer, set clear priorities together, and make confident decisions for your website.

Key Takeaways for the Business Owner

• Your Goal is “Good Enough,” Not Perfection. The most common and costly mistake is obsessing over a 100/100 score. Your real objective is to pass Google’s Core Web Vitals assessment (getting your metrics into the “green”) and be faster than your key competitors. This is the point of maximum return on your investment.
• Speed Directly Impacts Your Revenue. This is not just a technical issue; it’s a financial one. Data shows that a simple 1-second delay can reduce sales conversions by 7%, and over half of mobile users will abandon a site that takes more than 3 seconds to load.
• Prioritise Your Mobile Score Above All Else. Your mobile score reflects the experience of the majority of your visitors. A slow mobile site acts as a major leak at the top of your sales funnel, losing you potential customers before they ever consider buying—even if they planned to use a desktop later.
• Treat PageSpeed Insights as a To-Do List. The true value of Google’s report is the “Insights” section. It’s not a final grade; it’s a prioritised list of instructions. Handing this list to your web specialist is the most direct path to improvement.
• You Are the Project Manager, Not the Technician. This guide provides you with an independent “second set of eyes” to understand the issues and manage the process. Your role is to use this data to have intelligent conversations with your expert and make informed, strategic decisions.
• Great Performance Requires an Expert. Speed optimisation is a delicate, specialised job where a single wrong move can break your website’s functionality. Your investment will be most effective when you use this guide to direct a skilled professional, rather than attempting the fixes yourself.

A Note on the Knowledge Centre and Your Website

It’s essential to understand how the new Knowledge Centre fits within your existing WordPress site. 

While the Knowledge Centre is built for speed, it doesn’t operate in isolation. It’s integrated into your main website, meaning it still loads your site-wide elements like the header, the footer, and your main theme’s styles and scripts. Think of your main site as the foundation; the performance of everything built on top, including the Knowledge Centre, is affected by it.

This creates a fantastic opportunity. 

Any performance improvements you make to your core website will also benefit the Knowledge Centre. For example, if you optimise a slow-loading script in your site’s footer, not only will your main pages get faster, but your Knowledge Centre pages will see a speed boost as well. Improving your site’s overall health directly protects and enhances your new investment.

However, this connection also requires a word of caution. Website speed optimisation is a delicate process.

If a skilled specialist does not handle it, changes can have unintended consequences that break functionality across your entire website. 

An aggressive optimisation setting might inadvertently stop your contact forms from working or disable the search feature within the Knowledge Centre. This work must be undertaken by a professional who understands the complexities of WordPress.

We have delivered the Knowledge Centre in a fully functional and tested state. We know that it works well. 

If you find that it suddenly stops working correctly after you have made performance-related changes to your main site, the first and most important troubleshooting step is to check what has changed at your end. Temporarily disabling those recent optimisations will help you quickly identify if a new setting is the source of the conflict.

Website Speed

Website speed can feel like a technical mystery, a subject you have to take on faith from your developers. 

This guide changes that. 

It will show you how to use a simple, free tool, Google’s PageSpeed Insights, to get a clear, independent picture of your website’s performance.

The goal isn’t to turn you into a web developer. 

It’s to give you a solid understanding of how your customers experience your site and how Google sees it. Your development team may have already done many of the things discussed here. This guide isn’t about second-guessing their work; it’s about creating a shared language so you can have more productive, data-driven conversations about where to invest your time and money.

Finally, it’s vital to set the right goal from the start. 

A common and expensive mistake is obsessing over a perfect 100/100 score. This guide will show you why that’s a strategic error. The real goal is to be “good enough”, a benchmark defined by user satisfaction, beating your competition, and smart business sense. Let’s get started.

Decoding PageSpeed: What the Score Really Means

The prominent 0-100 score from Google’s PageSpeed Insights (PSI) tool can feel like a final grade on your website. 

However, fixating on this single number is a mistake. The real value is in the detailed diagnostics, which reflect your customers’ actual experience. 

To make smart business decisions, you need to look beyond the score and understand the data that truly drives your bottom line.

Why Google PageSpeed Insights is the Only Tool You Need

In a crowded field of performance tools, Google’s own PageSpeed Insights (PSI) stands out as the source of truth. While many other tools exist, the vast majority are built on the same engine: Google’s open-source Lighthouse technology. They are, in effect, just showing you Google’s data in a different package.

By using the official PSI tool, you get the most up-to-date analysis, aligned directly with Google’s latest best practices and ranking priorities. 

This simplifies things immensely. You don’t need to juggle multiple reports. While your developer may need to use more granular tools in Google Chrome’s “Inspector” to fix things, the PSI report is the only diagnostic tool you need to guide your strategy.

Lab Coats vs. Living Rooms: The Two Types of Speed Data

The Google PageSpeed Insights report is broken down into two main sections. Understanding the difference is key to using the report strategically.

1. “Discover what your real users are experiencing” (Field Data) (or similar wording): This section shows how your actual customers experienced your website over the last 28 days. This data comes from real Chrome users who opt-in to sharing performance data, a project known as the Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX). This isn’t a simulation; it’s a direct measurement of your site’s performance “in the wild” on all sorts of devices and networks. However, for many new or smaller businesses, this section will show “No Data”. This just means your site hasn’t had enough visitors in the CrUX dataset yet. While the goal is to have good Field Data, its absence is common and means you should focus on the second part of the report.
2. “Diagnose performance issues” (Lab Data): This section is a diagnostic report generated by Google Lighthouse, an automated tool that loads your page in a controlled, simulated environment. Think of it as a lab test: it uses a set device and network speed to create a consistent snapshot, which is great for debugging. This section provides four key scores:
   • Performance (0-100): The main score, which is a weighted average of several technical metrics that measure speed, like First Contentful Paint (FCP), Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), and Total Blocking Time (TBT).
   • Accessibility (0-100): Assesses how accessible your site is to users with disabilities.
   • Best Practices (0-100): Checks for modern web standards, including security.
   • SEO (0-100): Runs a basic check for fundamental SEO guidelines.

While the Performance score gets the most attention, the best directive for your technical team is not “Get our score to 100”. It’s “Use the ‘Insights’ and ‘Diagnostics’ sections of the lab report to fix the issues that will improve the experience for our real users.”

Your Website’s ‘Vital Signs’: Core Web Vitals (CWV)

At the heart of Google’s user experience measurement are the Core Web Vitals (CWV). These are three specific metrics from the Field Data that Google sees as fundamental to a great user experience. They measure loading, interactivity, and visual stability.

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – The “Time to Value”: LCP measures how long it takes for the largest piece of content (like a hero image or a block of text) to appear. For a customer, it answers, “How long until I see what I came for?” A “Good” LCP is under 2.5 seconds.

Interaction to Next Paint (INP) – The “Responsiveness Test”: INP measures how quickly your page provides visual feedback after a user clicks, taps, or types. This metric officially replaced First Input Delay (FID) as a Core Web Vital on March 12, 2024, marking a crucial evolution in how Google assesses responsiveness.  The change was significant because FID was a limited metric; it measured only the delay before the browser could start processing the user’s very first interaction. It didn’t measure the time it took to actually run the code or update the screen, and it ignored every interaction after the first one.  

INP provides a much more complete picture. It measures the entire duration of all interactions throughout a user’s visit, from the initial click until the next frame is painted on the screen. Since Chrome data shows 90% of a user’s time is spent on a page after it loads, INP focuses on the entire user journey, not just the first impression. This means that every interactive element on your site, from an “add to cart” button to a complex form, now directly impacts your Core Web Vitals score. A “Good” INP is under 200 milliseconds.

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) – The “Annoyance Factor”: CLS measures visual stability, quantifying how much the elements on your page unexpectedly shift around while loading. It captures that frustrating experience of trying to click a button just as an ad loads and pushes it down the page. A “Good” CLS score is less than 0.1.

Metric	What It Means for Your Customer	Your Business Goal
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)	“How long until I see the main content?”	Under 2.5 seconds
Interaction to Next Paint (INP)	“Is the site responding to my clicks?”	Under 200 milliseconds
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)	“Why did the page just jump around?”	Score below 0.1

The Real Goal: Pass the Assessment, Don’t Chase the Score

The true objective is not to chase a perfect 100 score, but to pass the Core Web Vitals assessment. 

This assessment, found at the top of the PSI report, gives a simple “Passed” or “Failed” status. To pass, your site must ensure that at least 75% of its real-world users have a “Good” experience for all three Core Web Vitals.

This pass/fail assessment is your most important takeaway. 

A “Passed” status means your website delivers a quality experience to most visitors, which directly influences conversions and Google rankings. 

A “Failed” status gives you a clear mandate: fix the specific vital signs that are not meeting the “Good” threshold.

The Bottom Line: How Every Millisecond Impacts Revenue

Investing in website speed is a direct investment in your revenue. In today’s digital economy, user patience is incredibly low. The data clearly shows that every millisecond of delay carries a financial cost.

The High Cost of Waiting

The modern online consumer expects instant results.

• A one-second delay in page load time can cause a 7% reduction in conversions.
• 53% of mobile users will abandon a page if it takes longer than three seconds to load.
• The probability of a user bouncing (leaving after one page) increases by 123% as load time goes from one to ten seconds.
• For B2B sites, a site that loads in one second has a conversion rate three times higher than a site that loads in five seconds.

Real-World ROI: Why Speed is a Small Business Superpower

While foundational case studies from giants like Amazon and Walmart proved the link between speed and revenue, a review of their recent financial reports reveals a market that has matured. In their 2024 and 2025 investor communications, the strategic conversation around “speed” has decisively shifted from website loading speed to the logistics of physical delivery speed.  

This does not invalidate the business case for a fast website; it reinforces it for small businesses. For these mega-corporations, a high-performance website is now simply “table stakes”—an assumed baseline of quality. Their next competitive battleground is the last mile of delivery.

For a small business, however, the digital storefront is the primary battleground. Your first impression isn’t a delivery van; it’s the loading time on a customer’s mobile phone. Therefore, the established data on how speed impacts conversions is more urgent for you today than ever before. While the giants focus on logistics, your most critical advantage lies in mastering the first few seconds of the digital customer experience.

Beyond the Sale: Long-Term Value

A fast website also builds long-term brand equity.

• User Satisfaction: A fast, seamless experience builds trust. Research shows that 79% of shoppers dissatisfied with a site’s performance are less likely to buy from that site again. A fast website respects your customers’ time.
• Brand Perception: Your website is your digital storefront. A slow site can make your business seem inefficient or untrustworthy. Speed is a proxy for professionalism.
• SEO and Visibility: Google has been clear that page experience, with Core Web Vitals at its core, is a direct ranking signal. But there is no single signal. Google’s core ranking systems look at a variety of signals that align with overall page experience. A fast, user-friendly site is a better search result. Optimising for speed aligns your site with Google’s goals, which can lead to more organic traffic and a sustainable competitive advantage.

The Mobile vs. Desktop Dilemma

The PageSpeed Insights report separates mobile and desktop performance for a reason. They represent distinct user contexts, mindsets, and technical challenges.

Why Mobile Scores Are Almost Always Lower (And Matter More)

It’s common to see a much lower mobile score than a desktop score. This is by design. The PSI tool simulates mobile performance on a slower 4G network and a mid-range mobile device. This reflects the real-world challenges of mobile browsing.

The business implication is profound. With over 60% of all web traffic coming from mobile devices, the mobile experience is the primary customer experience. As noted earlier, for every second of delay on mobile, conversions can fall by up to 20%. Ignoring a poor mobile score is like ignoring the majority of your customers.

Different Devices, Different Intent

To optimise effectively, you must understand the user’s mindset.

• Mobile Users are in “Action” or “Discovery” Mode: A smartphone user is often on the go, multitasking, or has an immediate need. Their attention spans are shorter. The experience must be fast and focused.
• Desktop Users are in “Research” or “Purchase” Mode: A desktop user is typically in a more focused environment, doing detailed research or completing a high-consideration purchase. The larger screen makes it easier to compare products and fill out forms.

This is reflected in conversion data. While mobile drives more traffic, desktop conversion rates are often double or even higher than mobile rates. A common journey is for customers to discover products on their phones, add them to a cart, and then switch to a desktop later to complete the purchase.

Don’t Lose the Lead on Mobile

This brings us to a crucial strategic insight. Many businesses see the higher desktop conversion rates and conclude that’s where they should focus their efforts. This is a critical mistake. The mobile experience is the top of your sales funnel.

A slow, frustrating mobile site is a major leak at the start of the customer journey. If a potential customer’s first interaction with your brand is a page that takes five seconds to load on their phone, they will never make it to their desktop to buy. 

They will have already bounced to a competitor. 

Investing in mobile speed doesn’t just improve mobile conversions; it dramatically reduces top-of-funnel abandonment, feeding a much larger pool of potential customers into the final purchase stage on desktop.

The Million-Dollar Question: Defining ‘Good Enough’ 

So, when is your website’s performance “good enough”? The answer is not a single number. Chasing a perfect 100 score is a trap that leads to diminishing returns. A strategic definition of “good enough” is a benchmark based on user experience, your competition, and business reality.

The ‘Good Enough’ Trinity

A well-optimised website should meet these three goals:

1. Goal #1: Pass the Core Web Vitals Assessment. As we’ve covered, this is the technical baseline. A lab-based Performance Score of 90 or above is categorised by Google as “Good” and is a strong sign that a site will pass the real-world assessment. It’s also wise to aim for 90+ in Accessibility, Best Practices, and SEO.
2. Goal #2: Outpace Your Competition. Your website doesn’t need to be the fastest on the internet; it just needs to be faster than your direct competitors. Run PSI reports on your top 3-5 competitors. If they all score in the 60s, achieving a score in the high 80s gives you a distinct competitive advantage.
3. Goal #3: Meet the 3-Second Rule. This is the psychological baseline for mobile. As the data shows, user abandonment skyrockets after three seconds. Your most urgent goal should be to ensure your main content (LCP) loads well within this window for most users.

The Law of Diminishing Returns: Why Chasing 100 is a Trap

The effort and cost required to move from a “Good” score (like 92) to a “Perfect” score are massive compared to the benefits. 

Google’s own documentation on Lighthouse scoring is clear: the curve is not linear. The improvement needed to go from 99 to 100 is roughly the same as going from 90 to 94. Google explicitly states that a score of 100 is “extremely challenging to achieve and not expected“.

Focus on getting into the “green” zone (90+), passing the Core Web Vitals assessment, and being faster than your competition. 

Once you’re there, your time and money are almost always better invested in creating better content, improving your product, or launching new marketing campaigns.

Your Action Plan: Practical Paths to a Faster WordPress Site 

Understanding the ‘why’ is the first step. 

Now for the ‘how’. The PageSpeed report itself gives you a prioritised to-do list.

Your Primary Instruction: The “Insights” Section is Your To-Do List

The most actionable part of the PSI report is the section labelled “Insights” (previously “Opportunities”). This is a prioritised list of the exact issues slowing down your page, complete with estimates of how much time you can save by fixing them.

This section should be your primary set of instructions for your developer. For a WordPress site, the report often gives specific advice. It might recommend a particular caching plugin (like WP Rocket), enabling a specific setting, or using an image optimisation tool. This turns a technical problem into a clear directive: “Our speed report says to enable ‘Remove Unused CSS’ in our plugin to save an estimated 4 seconds on our load time.”

Path 1: The Foundation — Auditing Your Hosting

Before anything else, check your foundation. No amount of optimisation can fix a slow server. The key metric here is “Reduce initial server response time” in the “Diagnostics” section of the lab report. This measures your Time to First Byte (TTFB), or how quickly your server responds.

If this audit is flagged as an issue (often with a red icon), your hosting is the bottleneck. If you don’t see it flagged, it will be in the “Passed audits” section, meaning your hosting is not the primary problem.

If hosting is the issue, consider upgrading:

• Shared Hosting: Like an apartment building. Cheap, but performance can be slow if a “noisy neighbour” on the server gets a lot of traffic. Good for brand new, low-traffic sites.
• Virtual Private Server (VPS) Hosting: Like a townhouse. You have your own dedicated resources on a shared server. A great step up for growing businesses and e-commerce stores.
• Dedicated Hosting: Like owning your own house. You lease an entire server. Maximum performance for high-traffic, mission-critical websites.

Path 2: The Overhaul — A “Lighter Theme” Approach

If your hosting is fine but your site is still slow, look at your WordPress theme. 

A “lightweight” theme (like GeneratePress, Astra, or Elementor’s Hello Theme) is built with clean, efficient code and only essential features. This means faster load times. In contrast, many feature-rich themes suffer from “code bloat,” loading tons of unused code on every page.

Switching from a bloated theme to a lightweight one can be one of the single most impactful changes you can make. However, this is effectively a website redesign, requiring a significant investment of time and money. It may be more realistic to enhance your existing website.

If you do decide to switch, the choice between top-performing themes is less about marginal speed differences and more about your business workflow. Recent benchmarks confirm that themes like Hello, Astra, and GeneratePress are all exceptionally fast. The right choice depends on how you plan to build and manage your site.  

• Hello Theme is a minimalist “blank canvas” created by the Elementor team. It is the most efficient choice if you are committed to building your entire site with the Elementor page builder.  But Elementor is not the be-all and end-all. Some agencies love it, and for others it’s total overkill.
• Astra and GeneratePress are more versatile, standalone themes. They offer deep customisation options and work seamlessly with both Elementor and the native WordPress block editor, making them more flexible and adaptable solutions. I do like these themes that utilise WordPress’s core block editor – keeping things simple. I built this council website a few years back in Astra without Elementor.

Theme	Best For	Key Strengths
Hello Elementor	Dedicated Elementor Users	The most lightweight and streamlined foundation for sites built exclusively with the Elementor page builder.
Astra	Flexibility & Beginners	Prioritises clean code, deep customisation, and extensive developer-friendly hooks and filters.
GeneratePress	Developers & Power Users	Prioritizes clean code, deep customization, and extensive developer-friendly hooks and filters.

Path 3: The Surgical Strike — Executing the PSI To-Do List

This is the most common path. If your hosting and theme are solid, you can make targeted optimisations based on the “Insights” and “Diagnostics” sections in your Google Page Speed Insights report. Common fixes include:

• Image Optimisation: This is often the lowest-hanging fruit. Compress images, resize them correctly, and use modern formats like WebP.
• Leverage Browser Caching: This tells a visitor’s browser to save static files (like your logo) locally, so they don’t have to be re-downloaded on return visits. A good WordPress caching plugin will handle this for you. Most websites will have this enabled, but it’s always worth a check.
• Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML: This automated process removes unnecessary characters (spaces, comments) from code files to make them smaller and faster.
• Reduce or Defer Third-Party Scripts: Scripts for analytics, ads, or social media widgets can slow your site down. Remove any that aren’t providing value, and configure the rest to load in a way that doesn’t block your page from appearing.
• Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN): A CDN stores copies of your site’s assets on servers around the world, delivering them from the location closest to the user. This dramatically reduces latency.

A Strategic Recommendation Framework

1. Run a PSI Test & Check the Foundation. Look at “Reduce initial server response time.” If it’s flagged as a problem, start with Path 1: Hosting Upgrade.
2. Assess the Overall Structure. If server time is good, but “Reduce unused JavaScript” and “Reduce unused CSS” are your biggest issues, you likely have a bloated theme. Seriously consider Path 2: The Lighter Theme Overhaul.
3. Perform Targeted Fine-Tuning. If your server is fast and your theme is reasonably lean, but your score is in the “Needs Improvement” range, follow Path 3: The Surgical Strike. Give the “Insights” list to your developer and have them work through it.

Conclusion: From Diagnosis to Growth

Improving your website’s performance is not a technical chore; it is a fundamental business investment. As this guide has shown, the financial cost of a slow website, measured in lost conversions, higher bounce rates, and diminished brand loyalty, is both real and substantial.

While this guide empowers you to diagnose problems and set clear goals, implementing the fixes is a specialised job. Your role as the business owner is to lead the strategy, to be curious, ask informed questions, and be decisive in choosing the best path forward.

Your first step is a collaborative, data-driven conversation with your current developer or agency. 

Share your PageSpeed report and use it as a tool to align on goals. 

It may be that their excellent work has already resulted in great scores; in which case, the conversation is about maintaining that high standard. If there’s room for improvement, explore the situation together.

Based on that discussion, you can make a confident decision. Every situation is different.

• Perhaps your specialist/agency is ready to take on the challenge, and you can empower them to proceed.
• Alternatively, you might decide the best approach is to bring in an independent performance expert to focus solely on speed. This can free up your trusted website specialist to continue enhancing other valuable areas of your site, such as adding new features or improving content.
• If you work with an agency, they may already have their own performance experts ready to assist.

Whichever path you choose, if it involves bringing someone new to the team, the principle of “test first” is invaluable. Commissioning a small, paid discovery project, like a custom action plan, is a smart, low-risk way to vet any new expert’s skills and strategy before committing to the full scope of work.

To provide a practical starting point for this process, the Appendix that follows outlines three sample jobs you can use to find and test a specialist on platforms like Upwork with freelancers like Asad or you may find some good WordPress speed specialists here.

Ultimately, a fast website is a sign that you respect your customers’ time and are committed to providing a quality experience. By using Google PageSpeed Insights as a diagnostic guide rather than a final report card, you can make strategic, data-driven investments that build a stronger brand, foster greater customer loyalty, and drive sustainable growth for your business.

Over to you. Make it happen.

APPENDIX

Task 1: The Performance Audit & Action Plan

This is the perfect starting point as it requires no access to your website and tests the freelancer’s analytical and communication skills.

• Objective: To see if the specialist can accurately diagnose problems from a PageSpeed Insights report and create a clear, prioritised action plan that a business owner can understand.
• Instructions for the Freelancer:
  “Please conduct a performance audit of this URL: [your website’s homepage URL].
  Using Google’s PageSpeed Insights and any other diagnostic tools you use, please provide a 1-2 page report in a PDF or Google Doc that includes:
  • A non-technical summary of the main performance issues affecting our site’s Core Web Vitals.
  • A prioritised list of the top 5-7 actions we should take to improve our mobile performance score.
  • For each action, please provide an estimate of its impact (e.g., ‘high impact’, ‘medium impact’) and the complexity of the fix (e.g., ‘simple plugin setting’, ‘requires custom coding’).”
• What to Look For:
  • Clarity: Is the report easy to understand, or is it full of unexplained technical jargon? A good specialist can translate complex issues into plain English.
  • Prioritisation: Did they just list the suggestions from the PageSpeed report, or did they use their expertise to identify the tasks that will provide the biggest improvement for the least effort (the “low-hanging fruit”)?
  • Strategic Insight: Do their recommendations make sense for a WordPress site? Do they suggest specific plugins or techniques relevant to your setup?

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Task 2: The Staging Site “Quick Win”

This task tests the freelancer’s hands-on technical skills in a safe environment before they ever touch your live site. Note: This requires you to have a staging or development copy of your website. Most good web hosts offer this feature.

• Objective: To verify the specialist can safely and effectively implement a common optimisation and deliver a measurable improvement.
• Instructions for the Freelancer:
  “I will provide you with admin access to a staging copy of our WordPress website. The goal of this fixed-price project is to achieve a measurable improvement in the mobile PageSpeed score by addressing two key issues: image optimisation and browser caching.
  Your tasks are:
  • Install and configure a caching plugin of your choice to optimise file delivery and browser caching.
  • Optimise all the images on the homepage to ensure they are properly sized, compressed, and served in a next-gen format like WebP.
• Please provide ‘before’ and ‘after’ PageSpeed Insights report links for the staging URL and a brief summary of the actions you took.”
• What to Look For:
  • Professionalism: Did they communicate clearly before starting? Did they ask clarifying questions? Did they back up the staging site before making changes (a best practice)?
  • Measurable Results: Is there a clear improvement in the PageSpeed score and the Core Web Vitals?
  • Cleanliness: Did they complete the task without breaking any functionality or negatively affecting the site’s appearance?

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Task 3: The Competitive Speed Analysis

This task assesses the freelancer’s strategic thinking and whether they can connect performance to business goals and the competitive landscape.

• Objective: To see if the specialist can think beyond just the technical score and provide insights on how to gain a competitive advantage through speed.
• Instructions for the Freelancer:
  “Please create a brief competitive performance analysis. Compare our website’s homepage [your URL] against these three direct competitors: [Competitor A URL], [Competitor B URL], and [Competitor C URL].
  The deliverable should be a simple report or spreadsheet that includes:
  • A comparison of the mobile PageSpeed score and Core Web Vitals (LCP, INP, CLS) for all four websites.
  • Your expert analysis on the one key reason why the top-performing competitor is faster.
  • A strategic recommendation on how we can not just match, but exceed their performance in that specific area.”
• What to Look For:
  • Business Acumen: Do they simply list the scores, or do they provide actionable business intelligence?
  • Deep Analysis: Can they pinpoint a specific reason for a competitor’s success (e.g., “They are using a better CDN, which results in a 300ms faster TTFB,” or “Their hero image is 80% smaller than ours”)?

Strategic Recommendations: Is their advice generic (“make the site faster”), or is it a targeted plan to beat the competition (“By implementing X, we can improve our LCP by 0.5 seconds, which would make us faster than Competitor A”)?proaches while maintaining your authentic expertise.