7 min read
Why is my website slow?
A slow site is rarely one big flaw. It is usually four small decisions that each looked sensible on their own and add up to several seconds of waiting. The good news is that you can measure all of them yourself in under a minute.
Measure first, guess later
Put your URL into Google PageSpeed Insights. You get two numbers, one for mobile and one for desktop. The mobile number is the one that matters, because it is closer to what a real visitor experiences on a phone network.
Do not fixate on the overall score, it swings between runs. Look at LCP instead, the time until the largest part of the page appears. Under 2.5 seconds is fine. Over four is a problem that is costing you visitors.
Images nobody resized
This is by far the most common cause and the cheapest to fix. A photo straight off a phone is often four to eight megabytes. On the page it might display 800 pixels wide, which needs under 200 kilobytes. The visitor downloads the whole thing anyway.
The fix is to scale images down to the size they actually display at and save them in a modern format. On a properly built site this happens automatically on upload, so nobody has to remember to do it.
Plugins that load everywhere
A typical WordPress site runs somewhere between fifteen and thirty plugins. Each loads its own JavaScript and CSS, usually on every page, including the ones that never use it. A slider that only appears on the front page still fetches its code on every single subpage.
You can check this without technical knowledge. Open the site, right-click, choose Inspect and go to Network. Reload the page and count the files. A hundred requests on an ordinary subpage is a sign that this is your problem.
Third-party tracking and fonts
Every tracking script, chat widget and font pulled from another domain is a new connection the browser has to open before it can continue. Three or four of them is common and often costs a full second between them.
This does not mean analytics are forbidden. It means they should load after the page is up, not before it. The difference is a setting, not a rewrite.
Hosting, and when it is to blame
Hosting takes the blame more often than it deserves. It does matter in one case: if the time to the first response is over half a second, the server is thinking too long before it answers. On cheap shared hosting that happens whenever somebody else on the same machine gets a visitor.
What can be fixed and what cannot
Images, tracking and hosting are all fixes you can make to the site you already have. They are cheap and often return a second or more. Start there, always.
Plugins are a different matter. When a site stands on thirty of them all calling each other, speed is not a setting but a consequence of how it was built. Then the question is not how to fix it, but whether rebuilding on a foundation that is fast from the start is the better buy.
Measure mobile LCP before you buy anything. If it is under 2.5 seconds you do not need a new website. If it is over four and the images are already handled, the build itself is the problem.