Slow website? Here's how to make it fast

A slow website costs you customers before they read a word. People on phones give up on pages that sit blank, and search engines notice when visitors bounce straight back. The good news is that most slow sites are slow for the same handful of reasons, and the biggest fixes are often the cheapest.

How do you know if your website is slow?

Don't trust how it feels on your office computer: you're on fast Wi-Fi with the site already cached. Test it the way customers see it.

• PageSpeed Insights: enter a page address and look at the mobile results. It shows real-visitor data if your site has enough traffic, and a lab test with suggestions.
• Google Search Console: the Core Web Vitals report lists which pages are slow for real visitors.
• Your own phone: open the site on mobile data, not Wi-Fi, and count how long until you could actually read and tap.

Focus on the three Core Web Vitals: Largest Contentful Paint (main content visible within 2.5 seconds), Interaction to Next Paint (responds to taps within 200 milliseconds) and Cumulative Layout Shift (stays stable, 0.1 or less). Our guide to Core Web Vitals explains each one in plain language.

Why do websites get slow?

• Huge images: photos straight from a camera or phone, often several megabytes each, shown at a fraction of that size.
• Too many plugins and scripts: every slider, chat widget, pop-up, tracking tag and social feed adds code the phone must download and run.
• Heavy themes and page builders: many all-purpose themes load code for hundreds of features you don't use.
• Slow or overloaded hosting: cheap shared plans can take a second or more just to start sending the page.
• No caching: the server rebuilds every page from scratch for every visitor.
• Web fonts and video backgrounds: several font files and an autoplaying video can outweigh everything else on the page.

The fixes that make the biggest difference, in order

1. Compress and resize images. Serve images at the size they're displayed, in modern formats such as WebP or AVIF, and lazy-load anything below the first screen. This alone often halves page weight.
2. Remove what you don't need. Audit plugins, widgets and tracking tags. If nobody can say what one does, remove it and see if anyone notices.
3. Delay third-party scripts. Chat widgets, review badges and marketing tags can usually load after the page is usable instead of before.
4. Turn on caching and a CDN. Page caching and a content delivery network serve ready-made pages from a server near the visitor.
5. Upgrade hosting. If the server takes more than half a second to respond, no front-end fix will save you. Look for current PHP or Node versions, HTTP/2 or HTTP/3 and server-level caching.
6. Simplify fonts. Use one or two font families, load only the weights you use, and host them yourself with preloading.
7. Replace sliders and background videos with a single strong image. They rarely help conversions and almost always hurt speed.

When does a rebuild make more sense than fixing?

If your site is built on a heavy page builder with dozens of plugins, you can spend a lot of time shaving fractions of a second off a foundation that will never be fast. Signs that a rebuild is the better investment: the theme is no longer updated, the mobile score stays in the red after the obvious fixes, or the site also has security or design problems. A purpose-built site with only the code it needs is usually faster than any amount of optimization on an overloaded one.

When we rebuilt our own website we replaced a WordPress theme, page builder, slider and caching plugins with a lean Next.js site. Mobile performance scores went from the 40s and 50s to the mid-90s.

Speed checklist

• Images sized for the screen, in WebP or AVIF, lazy-loaded below the fold.
• No unused plugins, widgets or tags; the rest load after the page.
• Page caching and a CDN on.
• Server responds in under half a second.
• One or two font families, preloaded.
• Every image and embed has set dimensions so nothing jumps.

If you'd like a second opinion, we can audit your site and tell you which fixes are worth doing. Our web design service builds sites that pass Core Web Vitals on mobile from day one.