Why Your Website Is Slow and How to Fix It

Measure first, then fix

Before anything else, run your site through PageSpeed Insights — Google's free tool. Look at the mobile score, not desktop; desktop is almost always a prettier picture than reality.

The tool gives you a score and a list of issues. You don't need to understand every item — in practice it all comes down to the five things below.

1. Photos nobody resized

This is by far the most common cause and the easiest to fix. A phone photo is 4,000 pixels wide and 6 MB. It's displayed on the site at 800 pixels. That means the visitor downloads eight times more data than they need — and on mobile data, that's seconds of waiting.

What you can do yourself: resize photos to at most 1,600 pixels wide before uploading them, and compress them with a free tool (Squoosh, TinyPNG). Aim for under 200 KB per photo. If your site's platform supports it, enable modern image formats (WebP) and lazy loading.

On one site I took over, cleaning up the photos alone dropped the homepage's weight from 11 MB to 900 KB. Nothing else was touched.

2. Too many plugins running in the background

A typical site built on an off-the-shelf content management system, a few years old, has around twenty plugins — of which five are actually used. Each one loads its own code on every page, including the gallery plugin sitting on a page with no gallery at all.

What you can do yourself: go through the plugin list and disable anything you don't recognize or use. Make a backup first. If something breaks, turn it back on — that way you'll know exactly what does what.

3. Third-party scripts

A chat widget, two analytics tools, a Facebook pixel, an embedded map, an embedded Instagram feed, a cookie banner. Each one calls someone else's server, and your site waits for the slowest one.

An embedded Google Map and Instagram feed are especially expensive — often heavier than your entire page.

What you can do yourself: ask yourself, for each tool, whether anyone has actually looked at it in the last three months. Cut your analytics down to one tool. Instead of an embedded map, use an image with a link that opens the map in a new tab — the visitor doesn't notice the difference, but the site does.

4. Fonts loaded from someone else's server

If the site pulls fonts from Google Fonts' servers, the browser has to open an additional connection to another domain before it can even render text. The result: a blank page, or text that jumps around once the font arrives.

What requires a developer: fonts should be downloaded and hosted on your own server, with only the characters you actually need (for our alphabet that's Latin and Latin Extended). Side benefit: it also resolves the issue of sending visitor data to a third party.

5. Hosting that shares a server with a hundred other sites

The cheapest hosting plans cram a large number of sites onto the same server. When one of them gets a traffic spike, all the others slow down. You can spot this when the site is sometimes fast and sometimes inexplicably slow at the same time of day.

What you can do yourself: measure server response time at different times of day. If it swings from half a second to three, the problem is hosting, not the site. For ordinary brochure sites there are now free or very cheap plans that are faster than paid hosting from five years ago.

What doesn't help as much as people think

• A caching plugin as the only fix. It helps, but it doesn't fix an 11 MB site — it just delivers the same 11 MB faster.
• Removing animations. Animations rarely slow down loading; images and scripts do.
• Chasing a 100/100 score. A visitor doesn't feel the difference between 85 and 100. The difference between 30 and 85, they feel immediately.

When fixing costs more than a new site

Sometimes the foundation is such that every fix opens up two new problems — a site on an abandoned platform, a theme that no longer gets updates, code nobody understands. In that case it's honest to say a new site is cheaper than patching the old one.

But that's rarer than people think. Most slow sites I see get fixed by cleaning up images, clearing out plugins and switching hosting — without building a new site at all.

If you want someone to take a look for you

Send the link and within 48 hours you get a free analysis: what's specifically slowing the site down, what it looks like on a phone, what Google can't read, and three things you can fix right away, without me. No twelve-page report and no sales pressure.