7 things that make a website fast and rank well on Google
Speed and technical SEO aren’t magic. Here’s the checklist we run on every site before launch.
A beautiful website that loads slowly, or that Google doesn’t understand, loses customers every day. The good news: most problems are solved while the site is being built, if you know what to check. This is our list.
1. Core Web Vitals in the green
Google measures how fast the main content appears (LCP), how stable the page is while loading (CLS) and how quickly it responds to clicks (INP). We check them with PageSpeed Insights on mobile, not just desktop, because most visitors arrive on a phone.
2. Images at the right size
The most common cause of a slow site is oversized photos. We use modern formats (WebP or AVIF), the right dimensions for each screen and lazy loading for images further down the page.
3. One H1 and a logical heading order
Every page has a single main heading, and sections use H2 and H3 in order. It helps Google understand the topic and helps screen reader users.
4. A unique title and description for each page
The page title (under 60 characters) and meta description (around 150) are what people see in search results. Written well, they raise your click-through rate even before your ranking improves.
5. Sitemap, robots.txt and clean URLs
- an XML sitemap that updates itself, submitted in Google Search Console;
- a robots.txt that doesn’t accidentally block important pages;
- short, descriptive URLs like
/blog/fast-website, not/?p=123; - a canonical URL on every page, so there’s no duplicate content.
6. Structured data
Structured data (schema.org) tells Google exactly what a page contains: a business, an article, a product, an FAQ. It can earn rich results with stars, prices or answer snippets.
7. The right version for each language
If your site has several languages, every page should point to its translations with hreflang tags. Otherwise Google may show the wrong version to visitors in another country.
None of these is hard on its own. What makes the difference is checking all of them, on every page, not just the home page. Want to know how your site measures up? Get in touch and we’ll run a quick review.