what is website accessibility and why should i care
What most mid-market teams think accessibility means:
Screen readers. Alt text on a few images. A compliance checkbox somewhere on the backlog.
What it actually involves:
Four distinct principles covering every interaction on your site. Keyboard operability. Colour contrast ratios. Semantic HTML structure. Predictable form behaviour. Video captions. Code that assistive tech can actually parse.
The gap between those two lists is enormous.
And here’s what gets missed: roughly one in five people in the UK has some form of disability. Add temporary impairments like a broken wrist or age-related vision decline, and the real number is far higher.
These aren’t edge cases. They’re your buyers, your procurement contacts, your decision-makers.
Most B2B companies file this under “we’ll get to it eventually.” Meanwhile their site is quietly excluding revenue, accumulating legal exposure, and hurting search performance all at once.
The cost of fixing it goes up the longer you wait.
We wrote about where this breaks down and why it matters more than most teams realise.
how to optimise images for my website without losing quality
Images account for 40-70% of total page weight on most mid-market B2B websites we look at.
Not code. Not fonts. Not third-party scripts. Images.
A typical page carrying 4MB of assets has 2-3MB of photos that could be 400-600KB without a single visible difference. That’s a 60-80% reduction sitting right there, untouched.
So why hasn’t it been done?
Because the risk feels wrong. Nobody on the marketing team wants to be the person who made the site look cheap. So the 5000-pixel stock photo stays exactly as uploaded. The CMS serves it at full resolution to every device. Phones get the same file as desktops.
The original image was prepared for print or maximum flexibility. A full-width hero on a Retina display needs about 1600-1800 pixels wide. The other 3,200 pixels? Downloaded and immediately discarded by the browser. Every single visit.
The performance cost is real. Largest Contentful Paint, Core Web Vitals, bounce rates, search rankings. All dragged down by assets nobody ever resized because the process felt too risky to touch.
This isn’t a hosting problem. It’s a workflow problem. And the gap between knowing that and actually fixing it without breaking things is wider than most teams expect.
We wrote about where this goes wrong and what makes it tricky.
how to choose the right hosting for my website
Your pages take 4+ seconds to load.
The instinct: optimise images. Add a caching plugin. Minify the CSS.
Usually treating the symptom, not the cause.
Most mid-market sites we audit with performance problems trace back to something nobody wants to revisit: the hosting environment.
→ Server response time is 800ms+ before a single asset starts loading
→ That slow TTFB eats 40-60% of the total page load budget
→ Core Web Vitals tank, and no amount of front-end optimisation can compensate
The painful part? Hosting was chosen months earlier based on price or a passing recommendation. Before anyone had defined what “good performance” actually looked like for the site.
By the time it surfaces as a problem, it’s baked in. Migration is disruptive and expensive.
The comparison sites most teams use to choose? Those rankings are based on affiliate commissions, not performance data.
We mapped this out in our latest article. Worth reading before you pick a host, not after.
what is a cdn and does my website need one
“We added a CDN so the site should be faster now.”
This sentence has cost more teams more wasted months than I can count.
A CDN solves exactly one problem: the physical distance between your server and your visitors. London server, Sydney visitor, 17,000 kilometres of latency. That’s the gap it closes.
But most slow websites aren’t slow because of distance.
They’re slow because of bloated code. Unoptimised images. A pile of third-party scripts nobody audited.
Put a CDN in front of that and you get the same sluggish experience delivered from a server that happens to be closer. Marginally better. Fundamentally unchanged.
There’s also a metric most teams never look at: cache hit ratio. It determines whether your CDN is actually serving files from the edge or just bouncing requests back to your origin server anyway. A badly configured CDN can quietly do almost nothing.
The real question isn’t “do we need a CDN.” It’s “do we know which problem is actually making this site slow.”
If you’ve been assuming a CDN would move the needle and it hasn’t, this piece explains why.
How To Speed Up A WordPress Website
If your WordPress site is slow after installing a caching plugin, it’s usually not a caching problem. It’s an architecture problem.
This pattern shows up constantly:
→ Slow page loads → blamed on hosting, but actually caused by a theme loading 14 stylesheets and a page builder injecting 400KB of unused CSS.
→ Poor Core Web Vitals → blamed on images, but actually rooted in how the page is constructed and how many render-blocking resources load before anything appears.
→ Speed fixes that don’t stick → blamed on traffic spikes, but actually the result of layering optimisation plugins on top of a fundamentally bloated stack.
The uncomfortable truth is that most WordPress speed problems are locked in by the time the site launches. The theme, the hosting environment, the plugin accumulation, the page builder decisions. These aren’t things you toggle your way out of.
We put together a detailed breakdown of how to approach WordPress speed at every level, starting with the structural decisions that account for the biggest gains. Worth reading before you spend another afternoon configuring plugin settings that won’t move the needle.
What Are Core Web Vitals
Can your team name the three specific metrics Google uses to score your site experience, and tell you whether you’re passing or failing on real user data?
Most can’t. And it’s not a trivia problem. Core Web Vitals have been a ranking signal since 2021, built on field data from actual Chrome users, not the synthetic lab tests most teams rely on. That means the speed score you pulled up last quarter might have almost nothing to do with what Google is actually seeing.
The gap between lab results and real user experience is where the real problems hide. Fixing the wrong metric, optimising for a test environment that doesn’t reflect production, chasing a green score while actual visitors experience something completely different. These are patterns we see constantly in mid-market companies where nobody owns site performance full time.
One metric was even replaced in 2024. If your last performance audit was before that, you’re literally measuring against an outdated standard.
We published an article breaking down what these metrics actually measure, why field data and lab data diverge, and what that means for your search visibility. Worth reading before your next site review.
Why Is My Website Slow And How Do I Fix It
Before: Someone on the team says “the site feels slow.” You install a caching plugin, compress a few images, and hope for the best. A month later nothing has meaningfully changed because you optimised things that weren’t the actual bottleneck.
After: You run PageSpeed Insights on your homepage and top landing pages. You look at both lab and field data. You find out that 3 unoptimised third-party scripts account for 40% of your load time, your server response is fine, and the images everyone blamed aren’t even the main issue. You fix the right things and cut load time in half.
The difference is always diagnosis before treatment. We wrote a full walkthrough on finding and fixing the real reasons your site is slow.
Does Website Speed Affect Conversion Rates
How to improve conversion rates through site speed without just chasing a faster server:
1. Measure perceived load experience, not just raw time, because layout shifts and unresponsive buttons destroy trust even on technically fast pages.
2. Prioritize Core Web Vitals individually, treating LCP, CLS, and INP as separate conversion levers rather than one blended score.
3. Benchmark against your own industry and device mix, because a one-second improvement means very different things for a B2B lead gen site than for an e-commerce store.
4. Fix interaction readiness first, since a CTA that looks clickable but doesn’t respond for 1.5 seconds is a conversion killer that standard speed tests won’t flag.
The relationship between speed and conversions isn’t linear. The first second of delay costs far more than the fifth. Most teams either ignore speed entirely or optimize the wrong metrics.
We detailed the full process and the supporting data in this article.
SEO Isn’t Blog Posts: Intent Mapping + Site Architecture That Gets Found
Share You’ve been publishing. Traffic hasn’t followed. The problem isn’t effort. It’s that your site was never designed to be found. The pattern is familiar: someone decides organic growth matters, so the company starts publishing. A content calendar appears. An agency delivers keyword research. Articles go live weekly. Six months later, the picture hasn’t changed: […]
Performance Architecture: How to Bake Speed Into Your Website Before It’s Expensive
Share This isn’t about shaving milliseconds for sport. It’s about reducing drop off, increasing trust, and protecting paid traffic efficiency. When your site loads slowly, visitors leave before they see your message. When it shifts and stutters, they lose confidence before they read a word. When it feels sluggish, they assume your business operates the […]