Website performance directly impacts your bottom line. Research shows that 53% of mobile users abandon sites that take longer than three seconds to load. For Australian e-commerce businesses, where customers expect fast, seamless experiences, performance isn’t optional.
This guide covers the technical strategies that actually improve performance, based on hundreds of site optimisations we’ve completed.
Understanding Core Web Vitals
Google’s Core Web Vitals are now ranking factors, which means slow sites rank lower in search results. The three metrics that matter are:
Largest Contentful Paint measures how long it takes for the main content to load. Good performance is under 2.5 seconds. Most WordPress sites we audit score 4-8 seconds.
First Input Delay measures how quickly your site responds to user interactions. Good performance is under 100 milliseconds. Sites with heavy JavaScript often fail this metric.
Cumulative Layout Shift measures visual stability. Elements shouldn’t jump around as the page loads. This is particularly common with ads, embeds, and images without specified dimensions.
Image Optimisation Strategy
Images typically account for 50-70% of page weight. Optimising images is the single most impactful performance improvement for most sites.
Modern image formats like WebP and AVIF reduce file size by 25-50% compared to JPEG and PNG without quality loss. Every image on your site should be served in WebP at minimum.
Responsive images mean serving different sizes for different devices. A mobile phone doesn’t need the 2000px wide image you use on desktop. This alone can reduce mobile page weight by 60%.
Lazy loading defers loading images until they’re about to enter the viewport. For long pages with many images, this dramatically improves initial load time.
We built a custom Next.js site for an Australian fashion retailer with over 500 products. By implementing proper image optimisation, we reduced average page weight from 4.2MB to 680KB, with no perceptible quality loss.
JavaScript Optimisation
JavaScript is often the biggest performance bottleneck, especially on WordPress sites with multiple plugins.
Code splitting means only loading JavaScript that’s needed for the current page. If a user is viewing a product page, they don’t need the code for your contact form. Modern frameworks like Next.js handle this automatically.
Third-party scripts from analytics, marketing pixels, and chat widgets can devastate performance. Each script makes additional network requests and executes code that blocks rendering.
Audit every third-party script. Does it need to load on every page? Can it be loaded asynchronously? Can it be deferred until after the page is interactive? Many sites can safely defer Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, and similar tools without losing data.
Font Loading Strategy
Custom fonts are essential for branding but often cause layout shift and slow rendering.
Font subsetting reduces file size by including only the characters you actually use. If your site is in English, you don’t need Chinese or Arabic characters in your font files.
Font display swap shows fallback fonts immediately while custom fonts load. This eliminates the “flash of invisible text” and improves perceived performance.
Preloading critical fonts tells the browser to download them immediately rather than waiting until CSS is parsed. This can improve rendering time by 500ms or more.
Server and Hosting Optimisation
Server response time matters tremendously. If your server takes 2 seconds to respond, no amount of frontend optimisation will make your site fast.
For Australian businesses targeting Australian customers, hosting location is critical. A server in Sydney responds 100-200ms faster than a server in the United States for Australian users. This might not sound like much, but it’s the difference between a 2.5 second load time and a 2.7 second load time, which impacts both rankings and conversions.
Content Delivery Networks distribute your content globally. Even with an Australian server, a CDN serves assets from whichever location is closest to the user. This is essential for international traffic.
We host most client sites on Vercel with CDN caching. This combination delivers sub-second response times globally, with particularly strong performance across Australia and Asia-Pacific.
Database Optimisation for WordPress
WordPress sites slow down as the database grows. Every plugin creates tables, every revision is saved, and unused data accumulates.
Regular database optimisation removes post revisions, trashed items, and unused tables. This can reduce database size by 30-50% and improve query speed proportionally.
Object caching stores frequently accessed data in memory rather than querying the database repeatedly. For high-traffic WordPress sites, this is essential.
Query optimisation means ensuring plugins and themes use efficient database queries. A poorly coded plugin can make hundreds of unnecessary queries per page load.
Caching Strategy
Caching serves pre-generated content rather than generating pages dynamically for each visitor.
Browser caching stores assets locally on the visitor’s device. Return visitors load the page much faster because CSS, JavaScript, and images are already downloaded.
Server-side caching generates pages once and serves that cached version to multiple visitors. This is crucial for WordPress sites where generating a page requires dozens of database queries.
CDN caching stores static assets at edge locations worldwide. Images, CSS, and JavaScript files are served from whichever server is closest to the visitor.
Mobile Performance
Over 70% of Australian e-commerce traffic comes from mobile devices. If your site isn’t optimised for mobile, you’re losing customers.
Mobile performance is typically worse than desktop because of slower processors, limited bandwidth, and smaller viewport sizes. A site that loads in 2 seconds on desktop might take 6 seconds on a mid-range phone.
Responsive design isn’t enough. You need to optimise for mobile specifically by reducing page weight, minimising JavaScript, using appropriate image sizes, and testing on actual devices.
We test every site on real Australian networks using actual devices. Loading over 4G in regional areas reveals performance issues you won’t see on fast office wifi.
Performance Monitoring
Performance isn’t a one-time fix. It degrades over time as content is added, plugins are installed, and code accumulates.
Google PageSpeed Insights provides a snapshot but doesn’t show real user performance. Use Google Analytics 4 or similar tools to track actual load times for your visitors.
Set performance budgets that limit page weight, JavaScript size, and load time. When you approach these limits, it’s time to optimise before performance becomes a problem.
Monthly performance audits catch issues early. We review client sites regularly to ensure they stay fast as content and traffic grow.
Measuring the Impact
Performance improvements should be measurable in business metrics, not just technical scores.
Conversion rate typically improves by 1-2% for every 100ms reduction in load time. For an e-commerce site doing $1M annually, a 500ms improvement could generate an additional $10-20K in revenue.
Bounce rate decreases as load time improves. Users who see content quickly are more likely to engage with your site.
SEO rankings improve with better Core Web Vitals. Google confirmed that performance is a ranking factor, particularly for mobile searches.
Getting Professional Help
Website performance optimisation requires technical expertise across multiple domains. If your site scores below 70 on PageSpeed Insights, or if you notice high bounce rates and poor conversion, it’s worth bringing in specialists.
At TALKK, we conduct comprehensive performance audits that identify specific bottlenecks and provide a prioritised optimisation plan. For many businesses, this investment pays back within months through improved conversion rates and SEO rankings.
