In regards to speed, in organic search improving speed gives a higher score and gives a ranking advantage to those who have faster loading sites. In addition to the better user experience score with faster load times.
Here are just a few things you can do to improve your sites speed and rankings ion teh search engines.
- Serve images in nextgen formats. Images can be converted to webp and also newer jpeg formats and save around 50-%85 in size.
- Cache static objects with directives set in .htaccess
- Cache the web pages
These 3 things are not all that can be done but will have the greatest impact and cause the least amount of problems or major other work.
There may be some slow execution in the extensions also slowing things down, ideally, you want to see 1/2 second execution time or under when the page is generated on the server, you may be .75 – 1 second. There could be an extension you don’t use or need that should be disabled.