Why is my website so slow?
Slow websites lose customers before anybody reads a word, and the cause is nearly always one of four things. None of them require you to understand code.
First, test it properly, because the speed you experience is not the speed your customers get. Your browser has your site cached and your broadband is better than their mobile signal.
Test it the way a customer would
Use Google PageSpeed Insights, which is free, and read the mobile score rather than the desktop one. Most of your visitors are on a phone and mobile is where sites fall over.
Then do the real-world version: open the site on your own phone, on mobile data rather than home wi-fi, somewhere the signal is ordinary. That is the experience that costs or earns you the enquiry.
Do not judge it by reloading it on the computer that built it. That page is cached and will feel instant no matter how heavy it is.
Cause one: the images
This is the biggest cause by a distance on small business sites. A photograph straight off a phone or a camera can be four or five megabytes, and a page with six of them is asking a visitor on mobile data to download more than some apps.
The fix is to resize and compress before uploading. Almost nothing on a website needs to be wider than about 2,000 pixels, and most images need far less. Modern formats such as WebP cut the size again at the same visual quality.
If you change one thing, change this. It is usually the difference between a page that appears immediately and one that takes five seconds.
Cause two: too many plugins and third-party scripts
Every chat widget, review carousel, booking embed, tracking pixel, font service and analytics tool loads its own code from somebody else's server. Each is small on its own. Fifteen of them is a slow website, and your page waits on servers you do not control.
Go through what is installed and remove anything you are not actually using. The review widget from a service you stopped paying for, the chat tool nobody answers, the three analytics tools when one would do.
Cause three: cheap or distant hosting
Shared hosting at a pound or two a month puts your site on a server with hundreds of others, and when they are busy you are slow. Hosting physically far from your customers adds delay to every single request.
For a UK business serving UK customers, hosting should be in or near the UK or on a network that serves from close by. This is not expensive any more, and it is one of the few technical decisions worth caring about.
Cause four: the platform itself
Some builders produce heavy pages by default, loading large frameworks to display a page of text. You can improve it by removing unused sections and keeping images light, but there is a floor you cannot go below.
If you have done everything else and mobile is still poor, the platform may be the constraint. That is a rebuild decision rather than a tweak, and it is worth knowing before you spend months optimising around it.
How fast is fast enough
A reasonable target is that the main content appears within about two and a half seconds on a mid-range phone on mobile data. Under that, most people wait. Above four, a lot of them leave.
Perfect scores are not the goal and chasing them is a waste of an afternoon. The goal is that the page appears quickly on a phone with an average signal, which is a lower bar than the tools imply and a higher one than most sites clear.
Common questions
- Does site speed affect Google rankings?
- Yes, though less than people think. Google uses page experience as one signal among many, and relevance matters more. Speed affects your enquiries more directly than your ranking, because slow pages get abandoned before anyone reads them.
- What is a good PageSpeed score?
- Anything above about 70 on mobile is respectable for a real business site with photographs. Chasing 100 usually means stripping out things customers actually want. Judge it on how it feels on a phone, not on the number.
- How do I make my images smaller without them looking bad?
- Resize to the largest size the page actually displays, then compress. Free tools do both in a browser. For most small business sites nothing needs to be more than about 2,000 pixels wide, and most images are fine at half that.
- Will a faster host fix everything?
- Only if hosting is your problem. If the page is loading twenty megabytes of photographs, a faster server sends the same twenty megabytes slightly sooner. Fix the images first, then look at hosting.
- My site is fast on my computer. Why does it matter?
- Because your browser has cached it and your broadband is better than a phone on mobile data in a village. Always test on a phone, on mobile data, away from your own wi-fi.
If you would rather somebody just did it
I build websites for self-employed tradesmen and small businesses across the UK: £249 to build, then £49.99 a month to host, maintain and update it. The sites I have built currently hold 97 page-one Google rankings between them.