Performance Optimization

Slow is expensive.

Every second your site or application makes people wait, it costs you — customers who leave, staff who wait, search rankings that slip. I find out exactly why it’s slow, fix the causes, and prove it with before-and-after numbers.

Get a performance audit →

What slow actually costs

Customers don’t wait. Half of visitors abandon a page that takes more than a few seconds — before they’ve seen your offer, your prices, or your phone number. A slow site is a store with a stuck door.
Google notices. Page speed is a ranking factor. Slower than your competitors often means below your competitors.
Your team waits too. If staff use a slow internal system all day, multiply those seconds by every task, every person, every year. It’s payroll spent on progress bars.
Slow gets worse quietly. Sites rarely become slow overnight — they accumulate slowness one plugin, one image, one unindexed query at a time, so nobody notices until customers do.

Measured first — never guessed

Performance work attracts folklore: “add more server,” “install a caching plugin,” “it’s probably the host.” Guesses cost money and usually miss. I start every engagement by measuring where the time actually goes — every step from the visitor’s click to the finished page. The slow part is nearly always different from where instinct points, and measurement means we fix what’s broken rather than what’s fashionable to blame.

The usual suspects, found and fixed

Database queries — the single most common cause: queries fetching too much, running too often, or missing an index. Often the most dramatic fix, too.
Caching that’s missing (or fighting itself) — pages rebuilt from scratch for every visitor, or three caching layers stepping on each other.
Bloat — WordPress installs carrying 40 plugins, pages loading megabytes of scripts and images nobody trimmed.
Server and hosting mismatches — undersized servers, oversized servers doing nothing, PHP versions years behind (newer PHP alone is often a free speed upgrade).
Front-end weight — uncompressed images, render-blocking scripts, fonts loaded four ways.

How it works

1. Audit.

Fixed price. I measure everything and give you a plain-English report: what’s slow, why, what each fix would gain, and what it would cost. The report is yours — you could hand it to any developer.

2. Fix.

You pick how far to go; I work through the list in order of impact. No fix gets made without a measurement proving it mattered.

3. Prove.

You get before-and-after numbers — load times, page sizes, database timings — not adjectives. “It feels faster” isn’t a deliverable; numbers are.

Works the same whether it’s WordPress, Laravel, a custom PHP application, or a mix — because after 30 years, slow code all speaks the same language.

FAQ

Can’t I just install a caching plugin?

Sometimes that genuinely helps — and if it’s all you need, the audit will say so and cost you very little. But caching hides slowness rather than fixing it, and hidden slowness comes back at the worst times: checkout, search, logged-in users.

Will you need to redesign the site?

No. Performance work happens under the hood — your site looks the same, just faster. (I don’t do redesigns anyway; that boundary keeps this work focused.)

Is more expensive hosting the answer?

Occasionally — and sometimes the answer is cheaper hosting, because the real problem was never the server. That’s exactly what measurement settles. I have no hosting to upsell you, so the answer is whatever the numbers say.

How fast is fast enough?

Faster than your customers’ patience and your competitors’ sites. In practice: pages under two seconds feel instant enough that speed stops being a business problem — that’s the target, not a vanity number.

Find out why it’s slow.

The audit is fixed-price, plain-English, and yours to keep. Worst case, you learn your site is fine — that’s worth knowing too.

Get a performance audit →