Why is my website slow?
7 min read · Updated
A slow website doesn’t just annoy people. It quietly loses you work. Most people give up on a page that takes more than about three seconds to load, and on a phone with patchy reception that happens a lot. The frustrating part is you’ll never know: they don’t call to complain, they just call someone else.
The good news is that most small business websites are slow for the same handful of reasons, and most of them are fixable without a new website.
Big images are the usual suspect
If your site is slow, start here. Photos straight off a phone or camera are often 3 to 6 MB each, and a homepage with a big hero image and a gallery can easily weigh 10 MB or more. On a mobile connection that takes a long time to download.
The fix is usually simple:
- Resize images to the largest size they’ll actually be shown at. A full-width hero rarely needs to be wider than 1600 to 2000 pixels.
- Compress them. Modern formats like WebP are often 30% smaller than JPEG at the same quality.
- Lazy-load images further down the page, so they only download when someone scrolls to them. Most website builders have this built in now.
Doing just these three things often halves load time on its own. Our guide to image optimisation for non-designers walks through it step by step.
Too many plugins and scripts
Every chat widget, booking tool, tracking pixel, slider, social feed and pop-up adds code the browser has to download and run before your page settles. Each one might only add a little, but together they add up, and some of them block the page from showing anything until they’ve loaded.
WordPress sites are especially prone to this, because it’s so easy to install plugins and forget about them. Shopify stores collect it too: apps you uninstalled months ago sometimes leave their code behind in your theme.
What to do:
- List what’s installed and ask of each one: are we actually using this? Remove anything you’re not.
- Check for duplicates. It’s common to find two analytics tools, or a plugin doing the same job as something your theme already does.
- Ask your web person to defer non-essential scripts, so they load after the main content instead of before it.
Slow hosting
Before a page can load, your server has to answer. Cheap shared hosting can take a second or more just to respond, and that delay happens on every single page. In your report this shows up as “Server response”.
If your server response is under about 0.8 seconds, your hosting is fine and the problem is elsewhere. If it’s slow:
- Turn on caching. Most hosts and WordPress caching plugins can serve a ready-made copy of each page instead of building it from scratch every time.
- Use a CDN (content delivery network), which stores copies of your site closer to your visitors. Many hosts include one free.
- Consider better hosting if caching doesn’t fix it. For most small businesses, a good host costs a little more per month and pays for itself.
A heavy theme or page builder
Some themes and drag-and-drop page builders load a lot of code on every page, whether you use those features or not. Sliders, animations and background videos look great in a demo but can make a site sluggish on a real phone.
This one is harder to fix without help. A web developer can often trim a theme back, but if the theme itself is the problem, sometimes a lighter theme is the better long-term answer. That’s one of the few situations where a rebuild is worth considering.
Fonts and things loading from other sites
Custom fonts, embedded maps, YouTube videos and social media feeds all load from other companies’ servers. Each one is another connection the browser has to make. Embedding a Google Map or a YouTube video on your homepage can add seconds on its own.
Swapping a live map for a simple image that links to Google Maps, or showing a video thumbnail that only loads the player when clicked, keeps the look without the weight.
How to tell which problem you have
You don’t need to guess. A speed test breaks down where the time goes:
- Mobile and desktop load time tell you how bad it is. If desktop is fine but mobile is slow, the page is too heavy for a phone connection. That’s usually images and scripts.
- Server response tells you whether your hosting is part of the problem.
- The list of fixes in priority order tells you which problems are costing the most time, so you can start with the one that helps most.
Our free scan shows all three, in plain English, in about a minute.
What to do next
Start with the quick wins: images and unused plugins. Re-test after each change so you can see what helped. If you’re still slow after that, or the fixes involve your hosting or theme, it’s time to bring in a web developer, and your report makes a clear brief for them.
If you want a hand, you can request quotes from top-rated providers straight from your report. Read more about how the speed audit works, or see Core Web Vitals in plain English to understand the numbers Google uses.
Want the full picture? See what our free speed audit checks
Common questions
What counts as a fast website?
On mobile, aim for your main content to appear within about 2.5 seconds. Under 4 seconds is okay. Anything slower is losing you visitors.
Will better hosting fix it?
Only if your server is slow to respond. If your report says your server response is quick, the problem is the page itself, usually big images or too many scripts, and new hosting won't help much.
Does speed affect Google rankings?
Yes, a little. Google uses page experience, including speed, as one of many ranking signals. The bigger effect is on visitors, who leave slow pages before they ever see what you offer.
How do I check my speed?
Run a free scan. We use Google's PageSpeed Insights, the same tool Google uses, and explain the results in plain English with the fixes in order.