Most slow websites come down to the same few things: images that are too big, too many plugins and scripts, slow hosting, or a heavy theme. Often it's several at once. Here's what's usually behind a slow site, what it costs you, and how we fix it.
Why speed matters
People decide in seconds whether to wait. A slow site on a phone loses visitors before they see your phone number, and Google uses page experience, including speed, as one of many signals when ranking pages. Most visitors to a small-business website are on a phone, so mobile speed is the one that counts.
How speed is measured
Google's free PageSpeed Insights scores pages on three measures, called Core Web Vitals:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): how long the main content takes to appear. Good is 2.5 seconds or less.
- Interaction to Next Paint (INP): how quickly the page responds when someone taps. Good is 200 milliseconds or less.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): how much the page jumps around while loading. Good is 0.1 or less.
A score on its own doesn't say what to change. The useful part is working out what's causing it, and what's worth fixing.
The common causes
Images that are far too big
A photo straight off a phone can be several megabytes. Shown at the width of a screen, it only needs a fraction of that. It's the most common cause we see.
Too many plugins and scripts
Every chat widget, slider, tracking tag, font and plugin adds code the phone has to download and run. On WordPress sites in particular, plugins pile up over the years.
Slow or overloaded hosting
Cheap shared hosting puts many websites on one server. When the server is busy, your site waits. A fast server, or a static site served from a global network, makes a real difference.
Heavy themes and page builders
Many ready-made themes and drag-and-drop builders load code for features you never use, on every page. They're convenient, but they're often why a simple-looking site is slow.
Videos and sliders at the top
An autoplaying background video or a five-image slider in the first screen is usually the single heaviest thing on the page, and the first thing a visitor waits for.
No caching
Caching saves a ready-made copy of each page so the server doesn't rebuild it for every visitor. Without it, every visit does all the work again.
Signs speed is costing you
- The page is blank or half-loaded for a few seconds on mobile data
- Text or buttons jump as the page loads, so people tap the wrong thing
- Visitors land on the site and leave without calling or filling in the form
- The site feels slower than it used to, after years of add-ons and changes
How we fix it
We start by testing your site the way your customers see it: on a phone, on a mobile connection, across your homepage and main service pages. Then we work out which causes are really slowing it down, and fix them in order of impact.
- We resize and compress every image to the size it's shown at, in a modern format.
- We strip out the code you don't need, from unused plugins to scripts that load before anything useful appears.
- We make the first screen light, so your heading, phone number and main image appear quickly.
- We host on Cloudflare's global network, so pages are served from close to your visitors.
Sometimes tuning isn't enough. On a heavy theme or an old platform, you can spend a lot on fixes and still have a slow site. When that's the case we'll tell you, and a rebuild is often better value. Our comparison of static websites and WordPress explains why static sites are usually much faster, and redesign, rebuild or fix? covers the decision.
We look after speed, security and hosting as part of our website care service.
Want to know why yours is slow?
Get a free website health check. We'll test your site on a phone connection and tell you, in plain English, what's slowing it down and what's worth fixing.
This article is general information only and isn't legal, financial or technical advice for your situation. Questions? Talk to us.