A slow website rarely has a single cause. Usually small things have piled up: a huge photo here, one plugin too many there, hosting that fell short. The good news is that almost all of them can be fixed, and that they can be put in order from the easiest to the hardest.

How to know whether your website is slow

Open it on your phone, on mobile data and without wifi, which is how many people will see it. If the first content takes a while to appear, or the text jumps around while loading, there is room for improvement. For a more objective measure you can use PageSpeed Insights, Google’s free tool: it analyses an address and tells you which parts weigh the most.

Do not obsess over the score. What matters is that the page can be read and used quickly, above all on mobile.

The most common causes

  • Images that are too large. Photos uploaded just as they come out of the camera or the stock library, without resizing. This is usually cause number one.
  • Videos that load in full on arrival. A background video weighs as much as dozens of photos.
  • Too many add-ons. Plugins, chat widgets, maps, counters and advertising pixels: each one adds requests.
  • Heavy templates. Themes designed to suit everyone load code your website does not use.
  • Fonts. Four families with six weights each are a lot of files before a single letter is shown.
  • Tight hosting. A very basic plan shared with hundreds of websites responds slowly when there are visits.

What you can do yourself

  1. Resize images before uploading them. For a full-width photo, around 1,600 to 2,000 pixels wide is usually enough, and a good deal less for small ones.
  2. Remove what you do not use. Deactivated plugins, widgets nobody looks at, scripts from tools you no longer pay for.
  3. Limit the fonts to one or two families and to the weights that actually appear.
  4. Review the videos. An image that turns into a video when pressed is better than a video that downloads by itself.

When it no longer pays to keep patching

If the website is built on a very heavy template or carries years of add-ons, each improvement costs more and lasts less. At that point it usually works out better to rebuild it on a light base and keep what works: the domain, the good copy and the addresses that already get visits. We explain it in website redesign.

What speed does not fix

A fast website helps, but it is no substitute for a clear message. If visitors do not understand what you do or how to contact you, loading in half the time does not change the outcome. Speed and clarity go together.

And once it is fixed, it is worth checking from time to time: websites get slow little by little, with everything that is added. That is what maintenance takes care of.