This was a Talking Web newsletter on 9 June 2026 - join the newsletter here.

Hi,

>What Google’s been changing
>Make your website faster, today
>A few pro tips
> Next steps
>Technical SEO you need to know about
​
OK! I appreciate this is lot of information this week but honestly, sorting this can make a huge difference to your website’s performance both for Google, and for visitors (human or otherwise).

Hope you’re all well and enjoying the… tropical weather we’re having here in the UK. I managed to spend a lot of the weekend reading – if you like chatting about books, come and find me on my personal Insta!

Google’s latest obsession:

We’ve been noticing a lot of site’s reporting to have speed issues lately.

So we did a quick study at SiteVitals (the website health monitoring tool I founded and run alongside 18a) and it seems pretty certain that there’s been a big shift in how Google’s Page Speed Insights categorises website speed in the last couple of months.

You can read the study here if you like stats.

Therefore it does certainly seem as though Google wants your website to be faster than ever. And the sceptic might say it’s so that it costs them less for their AI to read it… hmmm….

So how can you make your website faster, today?

Well SOOO often a major culprit with site speed is just images that are too big.

So do a performance test on your website (no credit card required) and see if any images are too big.

Or just watch them load on your site and if they chug into view kinda a bit at a time, that means they’re far too big for the space where they’re being displayed.

SiteVitals will actually give you a resized version from the Performance dashboard, at the size you need it. Or if you’re handy with Photoshop/Affinity/Canva/Pixlr etc. resize them to the size you need them to be and re-upload them.

Keep in mind these pro tips:

  • To help your website pick up your new smaller versions, re-name them with a different file name and select that new image in your CMS so it doesn’t just carry on showing the old image of the same name because it’s got it cached somewhere.
  • Do your hosting a favour and delete the old big images – you don’t need to be paying to host them if you’re not using them anymore.
  • You probably don’t need a hero image to be much wider than 1800px wide.
  • Even if you’ve got a CDN picking up your images and optimising them, if they’re 4000px wide, the CDN will just be giving you a crunched 4000px wide image – so re-upload it at 1800px and let the CDN work it’s magic on that.
  • For more of an explanation on what I mean by a CDN, and for handling animated gifs and videos, read the blog post I wrote yesterday.

Next steps…

Once you’ve sorted the images, look for any massive 3rd party scripts loading via the Network tab on your browser. This is honestly easier than it sounds (it’s easier than the images actually in lots of ways) – and I’ve written you a guide here.

Technical SEO you need to know about

If you like getting your hands dirty and knowing about what really makes your website tick, OR you want to just have it explained simply so you can hold your own with your developer, make sure you come along to my next webinar: my second in The Agentic Web series. Grab your seat for the 25th June at 2pm.

Speak soon,

Lisa

​Web development at 18a​

​https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisafreemanweb