A slow website quietly costs you money. Visitors leave before the page appears, those who stay are less patient, and Google takes page experience into account when deciding what to show.
The good news: most slow sites are slow for the same handful of reasons, and most of them can be fixed.
Measure it first
Before changing anything, get a baseline. It takes five minutes.
- Go to PageSpeed Insights (pagespeed.web.dev) and enter your home page.
- Look at the mobile results first. That's where most of your visitors are, and where speed suffers most.
- Note the three Core Web Vitals:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): how long until the main content appears. Aim for under 2.5 seconds.
- Interaction to Next Paint (INP): how quickly the page responds when someone taps or clicks. Aim for under 200 milliseconds.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): how much things jump around while loading. Aim for under 0.1.
- Repeat for your most important pages: a service page, a product page, your contact page.
Google Search Console also shows these numbers for real visitors under Core Web Vitals.
The usual suspects
1. Huge images
The most common culprit by far. A photo straight from a camera or phone can weigh several megabytes, when the screen only needs a fraction of that.
Fix: resize images to the size they're displayed at, compress them, and use modern formats like WebP or AVIF. Serve smaller versions to phones. Load images further down the page only when the visitor scrolls near them.
2. Too many plugins and scripts
Every plugin, tracking pixel, chat widget, font and pop-up adds code the browser must download and run. Individually they seem harmless. Together they can double the load time.
Fix: list every third-party script and plugin and ask whether it earns its place. Remove what you don't use. Load the rest after the main content.
3. Heavy page builders and themes
Some all-in-one themes load code for hundreds of features you'll never use, on every page.
Fix: for an existing site, disable unused modules and use a caching or optimisation plugin. For a new site, a lean, custom-built front end is often dramatically faster.
4. Cheap or distant hosting
If your server is slow to respond, or located far from your customers, everything starts late.
Fix: choose quality hosting with servers near your audience, and use a CDN (content delivery network) so files are served from a location close to each visitor.
5. Autoplay video and big animations
Background videos and complex animations look great and can be very heavy.
Fix: use short, compressed loops, show a still image first, and load video only on larger screens or after the page is ready.
6. Web fonts
Several font families, each in multiple weights, can delay text from appearing.
Fix: use one or two families, only the weights you need, host them yourself and make sure text shows immediately with a fallback while fonts load.
7. Layout shift
Images without set dimensions and late-loading banners make the page jump, so people tap the wrong thing.
Fix: give images and embeds fixed dimensions or aspect ratios, and reserve space for anything that loads later.
Quick wins for this week
- Compress and resize the ten largest images on your site
- Remove plugins and scripts you don't use
- Turn on caching
- Replace an autoplay hero video with a strong still image on mobile
- Retest with PageSpeed Insights and compare
When to rebuild instead
If your site is built on an old, heavy theme with years of plugins piled on, optimisation can only go so far. A rebuild on a modern, lightweight foundation is often faster, cheaper to run and easier to update than continuing to patch.
If you'd like us to look at your site's speed, book a free 30-minute call. We'll run the numbers with you and point out the biggest wins.
