Why is my website so slow? (And how to fix it)

If you’ve ever opened your own website on your phone and stared at a blank screen for a few seconds, you know the feeling. A slow website is one of the things I get asked about most, and it’s also one of the most fixable. It nearly always comes down to a handful of causes, and you don’t need to be technical to work out which ones apply to you.

I’m the developer half of Shock Creative, and speed is a big part of my job. So here’s what usually makes a site slow, how to test your website speed for free, what you can sort out yourself, and when it’s worth getting a developer in.

Why website speed matters

Most visitors won’t tell you your site is slow. They just leave. Someone looking for a plumber or an accountant on their phone has a page of other options one tap away, and if yours is still loading, they’ll try the next one.

That shows up as enquiries that never arrive, which is hard to spot, because you never see the people who gave up. It matters for search too. Google measures how real visitors experience your pages, and those page experience signals are part of how it ranks sites. Speed won’t beat better content on its own, but when two pages are otherwise close, the faster one has the edge.

The usual reasons a website is slow

When I look at a slow site, it’s almost always one or more of these.

• Huge images: a photo straight off a phone or a stock library can be several megabytes. Upload it as it is and every visitor downloads all of it, even if it’s shown at the size of a postage stamp.

• Cheap or overloaded hosting: your host is the computer your site lives on. The cheapest plans pack a lot of websites onto one machine, so yours can sit in a queue before it even starts sending the page.

• Too many plugins and scripts: every chat widget, pop-up, tracking code and social feed is more code for the browser to download and run. On WordPress, a plugin can add its files to every page, whether that page uses it or not.

• No caching: without caching, the server builds each page from scratch for every single visitor. With it, the finished page is saved and handed straight out, which is far quicker.

• Heavy page builders and themes: drag-and-drop builders and do-everything themes are handy, but they load a lot of code to cover features you’ll never use. A simple page ends up carrying the weight of a complicated one.

None of these is a disaster on its own. The trouble is that they stack up. A site that was quick at launch gets a little heavier with every widget and banner added over the years, and nobody notices until it’s properly sluggish.

How to run a page speed test on your own site

You don’t need to pay for anything. Google’s PageSpeed Insights is free: paste in your web address, wait a minute, and it gives you a score out of 100 for mobile and desktop, plus a list of things to look at.

Look at the mobile results first. That’s where most sites struggle, and it’s mainly how Google looks at your site. Test a few pages, not just the homepage. Your main service pages matter just as much, and they’re often slower.

Near the top, if your site gets enough visitors, you’ll see your Core Web Vitals. These are three measurements Google uses to judge how a page feels to use, based on real Chrome users visiting your site:

• LCP (Largest Contentful Paint): how long the main thing on the page, usually the big image or heading, takes to appear. Good is 2.5 seconds or less.

• INP (Interaction to Next Paint): how quickly the page reacts when someone taps or clicks. Good is 200 milliseconds or less.

• CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift): how much things jump about while the page loads, like a button moving just as you go to tap it. Good is 0.1 or less.

If there isn’t enough real-world data for your site, you’ll only see the lab results from a single test. They’re still useful for spotting problems, just take the exact numbers with a pinch of salt. The score moves around a bit between runs too, so don’t worry about a few points either way.

Quick wins you can do yourself

Some fixes don’t need a developer at all. If you can log into your website, you can probably do these.

• Shrink images before you upload them: resize photos to roughly the size they’ll be shown and run them through a free compressor such as Squoosh or TinyPNG. On a lot of small business sites, this alone makes the biggest difference.

• Clear out what you don’t use: old plugins, a chat widget nobody answers, the homepage slider, tracking codes from a campaign that ended last year. If it isn’t earning its place, take it out.

• Turn on caching: many hosts offer it in their control panel, and on WordPress a reputable caching plugin will do the job. Click around the site afterwards to check forms and menus still work.

• Keep things updated: updates to WordPress, themes and plugins often include speed improvements as well as security fixes. Take a backup first.

• Host videos elsewhere: put videos on YouTube or Vimeo rather than uploading them to your own site, and don’t autoplay one at the top of the page.

Run PageSpeed Insights again afterwards, on the same pages, so you can see what actually changed.

When it’s worth getting a developer in

Quick wins only go so far. If you’ve tidied up and the mobile results are still poor, the problem is usually deeper: the hosting, the theme, or the way the site was put together in the first place. It’s probably time to ask for help if:

• there’s a long pause before anything appears at all, which usually points at the server rather than the page

• most of the warnings in PageSpeed Insights trace back to your theme or page builder, and swapping it isn’t a five-minute job

• something breaks every time you update or remove a plugin, so you’ve stopped touching it

• you’d rather spend your evenings running the business than learning what “render-blocking resources” means

A developer can find out where the time actually goes and fix that, rather than guessing. Sometimes a few days of focused work gets you most of the way there. Sometimes the honest answer is that a rebuild will cost less than years of patching. Either way, you should get a straight answer about which it is, not a sales pitch.

That’s the kind of job our web development work covers, and we build every site with speed in mind from the start. If you’d rather not think about servers and updates at all, our hosting and care plans look after that side for you, so the site stays quick long after launch.