Why is my website slow (and what to do about it)

A slow website costs you customers. People on their phones don't wait: if the page is still blank after a few seconds, they go back and tap the next result. Google notices this too, and fast sites tend to rank better.

The good news: most slow sites are slow for the same few reasons, and most of them can be fixed.

First, measure it

Open PageSpeed Insights (search for it, it's a free tool by Google), paste your address and look at the mobile score. Don't chase 100. What matters is the list under it: it tells you exactly what is slowing the page down.

1. Huge photos

This is the most common one by far. A photo straight from a phone or camera can be 5 MB or more, and the page only needs a fraction of that. Ten of those on one page and your visitor is downloading a small film.

Fix: resize and compress images before uploading, and use a modern format like WebP. A good site does this automatically.

2. Too many plugins and add-ons

Website builders and WordPress make it easy to add "just one more" plugin: a slider, a popup, a chat bubble, a social feed. Each one adds code that every visitor has to load.

Fix: list what you have and remove what you don't really use. Often half can go.

3. Cheap or crowded hosting

If your site lives on a server shared with hundreds of others, it can take a long time before it even starts loading.

Fix: better hosting, or a CDN (a network that keeps copies of your site close to visitors). For many small sites this costs little or nothing.

4. Heavy fonts and tracking scripts

Several font families, three analytics tools and a few marketing pixels all load before or alongside your content.

Fix: keep one or two fonts, and keep only the tracking you actually look at.

5. An old, bloated theme

Some themes load everything for every page: sliders, animations, icon sets, whether you use them or not.

Fix: sometimes a lighter theme. Sometimes a rebuild is cheaper than fighting the old one, especially if the site also looks dated.

What's worth paying for

Image and plugin clean-up is usually quick and gives the biggest gain. Hosting is next. A full rebuild only makes sense when the site is old in other ways too.

If you'd like a second opinion, send me your address. I'll run the checks and tell you in plain words what's slowing it down and what I'd fix first.