Why Your Website Feels Slow Despite 90+ PageSpeed Score

One of the strange things about Google PageSpeed is that your site can get a 90+ score and still feel slow when you open it. 

Every performance plugin struggles to solve this. 

But this week, we’ve released 3 major improvements that are showing amazing results. 

Let me explain. If you’re using a page builder like Elementor, a premium theme or Google Fonts, then you’re already using custom fonts. 

Without the right optimisations, these fonts make your site look unfinished after it loads. Headlines can appear in a default font and change a moment later, buttons can shift, and sometimes blocks of text just load slowly.

So we looked at all the different ways that fonts can slow down sites, and released 3 new font optimisations to solve this. 

TL;DR

• WOFF2 Conversion: AirLift converts older font formats into smaller WOFF2 files, reducing font size by about 33% on average.
• Font Subsetting: Visitors download only the characters the site actually needs, which has reduced optimized font files by 50–70% in our tests.
• Balanced Font Loading: AirLift can identify critical fonts, calculate their critical CSS, and preload them so your site never looks unfinished. 

All features are already live in both the free and paid versions; no updates required. 

First, we make the fonts much smaller

Before the browser can show a custom font, it has to download it.

Now, most WordPress sites aren’t loading a single font file. Different weights, styles, headings and sections can mean several font files are being loaded alongside everything else the page needs.

The bigger that file is, and the later the browser discovers it, the longer visitors can spend waiting for the finished version of the page. 

So we’ve released 2 new features to solve this:

1. AirLift automatically compresses larger font files into WOFF2, a much more efficient format, and we’ve seen that reduce their size by around 33% on average, without changing how the font looks.
2. Secondly, a font file can contain hundreds or thousands of characters that your site doesn’t need. AirLift’s Font Subsetting ensures your site only loads the characters it needs, making your font files 50–70% smaller

After this, the font files are much lighter, but most sites face another problem: the right font doesn’t always arrive early enough.

Smart timing is just as important 

Not every font on a page is equally important.

If someone has just opened your homepage, the font in your hero section needs to load first, and the one in the footer can wait.

Most plugins take a performance-first approach and load the full font stylesheet later. Technically, that keeps unnecessary work out of the initial load. But the downside is obvious: the visitor sees a fallback font first, then the real brand font arrives and the page settles into place.

We don’t think that is a good trade. So we’ve released Balanced Font Loading. 

AirLift can identify the fonts being used in the first visible section of the page and make those available earlier. Fonts needed further down can continue loading later.

And we’re deliberately not forcing it when we’re unsure. If AirLift can’t safely identify the right fonts to prioritize, it falls back to the existing performance-first method.

We’ve seen enough WordPress performance fixes over the years to know that getting a slightly better score isn’t worth breaking or distorting the page to get there.

But what if the website changes

There is one final problem that matters a lot more when you’re managing client sites.

WordPress sites keep changing, and the font setup you optimized last month may no longer match the site you’re serving today.

I feel this is one of the areas where performance plugins have historically put too much responsibility on users to manage. You shouldn’t have to remember to re-run an optimization every time the site changes, especially when you’re looking after dozens of client sites.

AirLift now includes fonts and stylesheets in its Automatic Re-optimization. As the site changes, AirLift can rebuild its optimized assets to match the new version of the site.

For an agency, that removes another little maintenance job you shouldn’t really have to think about.

We’ll keep pushing further

We’ve spent the last 3 years building AirLift around a pretty simple idea: speed optimization shouldn’t become another endless job for you to manage.

A lot of the work happens quietly in the background, with improvements like these. 

And there’s always more to fix. WordPress keeps changing, sites keep getting more complex, and now AI is speeding that up even further.

So whenever we find something that still needs too much tweaking, checking or manual work, we’ll keep trying to make AirLift handle more of it for you. 

The less time you spend worrying about site speed, the better we’ve done our job.