If you have ever wondered why your website is slow, the answer is almost always one of six things, and none of them is “the internet”. One client came to me with a site that took nine seconds to load on a phone; within a fortnight it loaded in under a second and scored 100 on Google’s speed test, and nothing about its design changed. This post explains what slowness costs, how to check your own site in two minutes, what the usual causes are and which fixes are quick.
What slow costs
Three things. First, visitors leave: a large share of people abandon a page that takes more than three seconds, and on a phone on a seafront signal three seconds arrives quickly. Second, the ones who stay convert worse, because every extra second of waiting erodes the patience a decision needs. Third, Google uses speed as a ranking signal, through measurements it calls Core Web Vitals, so a slow site is found less often, which compounds the first two. For a business whose customers arrive by phone, speed is not a technical nicety; it is part of whether the phone rings.
Check your own site in two minutes
- Go to pagespeed.web.dev, Google’s free testing tool.
- Paste in your home page address and start the test; it finishes in under a minute.
- Look at the Mobile result first; that is where most of your visitors are and the harder test.
- The Performance score is out of 100. Ninety and above is green, fifty to eighty-nine orange, below fifty red. Most small-business sites I test score between twenty and fifty on mobile.
- Scroll to the diagnostics. They list what is slowing the page, roughly in order of impact, and they map onto the causes below.
- Then run your busiest service or product page as well. The home page is usually the best-kept page on a site, and the ones that actually bring in enquiries are often much heavier.
The six usual causes
1. Images that are far bigger than they need to be
The most common cause by a distance. A photo straight from a phone is four or five megabytes; the space it fills on screen needs a tenth of that. Multiply by the twelve photos on the page and the visitor is downloading a feature film. Fix: resize images to the size they are shown, compress them, serve modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and provide different sizes for phones and desktops. Quick on most platforms; a plugin or a build step does it automatically once set up.
2. A heavy theme or page builder
Many WordPress sites are built on a theme that promises every layout imaginable and loads the code for all of them on every page, plus a page builder on top. The page you see uses five per cent of what was downloaded. Fix: harder. Sometimes a lighter theme and removing the builder; sometimes a rebuild. This is the structural problem behind most red scores.
3. Too many plugins and third-party scripts
A chat widget, two analytics tools, a social feed, a cookie banner from a third party, a font service, a review widget, a map embed. Each one is a separate connection to a separate server, and several run before the page can appear. Fix: remove anything not earning its place; load the rest after the page has appeared. Usually quick, and often the single biggest improvement.
4. Slow hosting
Cheap shared hosting can take over a second to begin sending the page, before a single image has loaded. The diagnostics call this “initial server response time”. Fix: better hosting (LiteSpeed servers and caching make a measurable difference) or a lighter platform. Moving hosts is a morning’s work.
5. Fonts and stylesheets that block the page
The browser cannot draw text until the font has arrived, or the page until the stylesheet has. Several fonts from an external service, plus a large stylesheet, mean a blank screen while they download. Fix: fewer fonts, hosted on your own server and preloaded; the critical styles inlined so the first paint is not waiting on anything. Moderate.
6. Things moving about after they appear
Not slowness exactly, but Google measures it alongside speed: the button that shifts as you tap it, text that jumps when an image above it loads. It happens when images have no dimensions set, fonts swap late or banners are injected above content. Fix: set image dimensions, reserve space, load fonts properly. Usually quick.
Quick fixes and structural ones
Images, third-party scripts, hosting and layout shifts can often be fixed on the existing site in days, and will take most sites from red to orange or green. A heavy theme, a page builder or a platform that was never going to be fast are structural: you can improve them at the edges, but the site will not be truly quick until it is rebuilt lean. A proper speed review sorts one kind from the other. If it is the first kind, it is a small job; if it is the second, it is usually the moment to think about a new build that is fast from the first line of code.
What a fast site looks like underneath
Every page I build aims for 100 on mobile, and the method is restraint: images sized and compressed for each screen, fonts subset and preloaded, the stylesheet inlined, scripts kept small and deferred, no third-party code without a reason, and fast hosting. This site is the demonstration, and you are welcome to run any page of it through the test. The fastest feature is the one that was never added, which is why, when a client asks why your website is slow, the first thing I usually do is remove things.
