You open your own website on your phone, and you wait. The logo appears, then the menu, then the photos arrive one at a time. If you are wondering “why is my website slow?”, your customers have probably wondered the same thing, and some of them did not stay to find out.
The good news is that slow websites are usually slow for a small number of ordinary reasons. Most can be fixed without rebuilding anything.
Measure it before you change anything
Your own impression is a poor guide. Your browser has saved parts of your site from earlier visits, and your office broadband is faster than a customer’s phone signal on a bus.
Use Google’s free PageSpeed Insights instead. Enter your address and look at the mobile result first. Ignore the big coloured score for a moment and read the three measurements Google calls Core Web Vitals:
- Largest Contentful Paint is how long the main content takes to appear. Good is 2.5 seconds or less.
- Interaction to Next Paint is how quickly the page reacts when someone taps or clicks. Good is 200 milliseconds or less.
- Cumulative Layout Shift is how much the page jumps about while loading. Good is 0.1 or less.
Google explains how these measurements work in detail. Test your homepage and one or two other important pages, and keep the results so you can tell whether your changes helped.
The five causes behind most slow websites
1. Images that are far too large
This is the most common cause by a distance. A photo straight from a phone or camera can be several megabytes and thousands of pixels wide, yet it is displayed in a space a few hundred pixels across. The visitor downloads all of it anyway.
Resize images to the largest size they are actually shown at, save them in a modern format such as WebP, and compress them. On WordPress, an image optimisation plugin can do this automatically for existing and new uploads. It is often the single biggest improvement available.
2. Hosting that cannot keep up, and no caching
If the server takes a second or more to begin responding, nothing else you do will make the site feel quick. The cheapest hosting plans place many websites on one machine, so your site slows whenever a neighbour is busy.
PageSpeed Insights reports this as server response time. If it is consistently poor, moving to better hosting is usually simpler and cheaper than trying to work around it.
Check caching while you are there. Without it, WordPress rebuilds each page from scratch for every visitor. With it, the finished page is saved and handed straight to the next person. Many hosts include caching and simply need it switching on. If yours does not, a caching plugin will do the job.
3. Too many plugins and a heavy page builder
Every plugin can add its own code to every page, whether that page uses it or not. A site with thirty plugins, a page builder and two add-on packs for the builder is carrying a lot of weight before any content appears.
Go through the list and remove what you no longer use. Where two plugins do similar jobs, keep one. Be careful, though: deactivate one at a time and check the site after each, and take a backup first.
4. Scripts from other companies
Chat widgets, social media feeds, embedded maps, video players, advertising pixels and analytics tools each load code from someone else’s servers. One or two are fine. Several together can add seconds, particularly on mobile.
Ask of each one whether it earns its place. A live chat nobody answers and a feed nobody reads are easy to remove. A map can become a picture that links to Google Maps, and videos can load only when someone presses play.
5. Outdated software
Newer versions of PHP, the language WordPress runs on, are noticeably faster than old ones, and updates to WordPress and its plugins often include performance work. A site that has not been updated for a couple of years is usually slower and less secure than it needs to be.
What you can do yourself and what needs help
| Fix | Do it yourself? | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Compress and resize images | Yes | A plugin handles most of it. |
| Remove unused plugins | Yes, with care | Back up first and test after each one. |
| Switch on caching | Usually | Check your host’s control panel before adding a plugin. |
| Remove third-party widgets | Yes | Start with the ones nobody uses. |
| Move hosting | Better with help | Email and domain settings are easy to break. |
| Update PHP and old software | Better with help | Old themes and plugins can fail on newer versions. |
| Reduce page builder and theme weight | Needs a developer | Sometimes means rebuilding templates. |
Change one thing at a time and test again after each. If you change five things at once and the site gets faster, or breaks, you will not know which one was responsible.
Does speed affect your position on Google?
A little, and less than people fear. Google has said that page experience, which includes Core Web Vitals, is one of many things its ranking systems consider, and that useful content matters more. Its own guidance on page experience is worth a read.
The stronger reason to care is your visitors. Someone comparing three local businesses on a phone will not wait for the slow one. Speed protects the enquiries you were already going to get.
When a slow site is telling you something bigger
Sometimes the slowness is built in. A theme abandoned by its author, layers of plugins added by different people over the years, or a design that was never tested on a phone can leave little to tune. If you have dealt with images, hosting, caching and plugins and the numbers are still poor, a rebuild on a lighter foundation may cost less than continuing to patch. There are other signs that a website needs replacing to weigh up as well.
That is a judgement worth getting a second opinion on. Keeping a site quick is part of what our website care plans cover, and where a site has reached the end of the road, our website design service starts from a fixed price.