Why your website is slow, and what it's costing you

Test it the way your customers do

Before anything else, do this: open your website on your phone, with WiFi turned off, and count the seconds until you can tap something.

That number is your real speed. Checking it on a laptop connected to home internet tells you nothing, because that isn't how anyone finds you.

For a second opinion, Google's PageSpeed Insights is free and only needs your URL. Look at the mobile score.

What it actually costs

Slow pages cost you in two directions at once.

Visitors leave. Not dramatically — they just go back and click the next result, and they don't remember doing it. You never see those people in any report.

And Google notices. Page speed is part of how it ranks pages, particularly on mobile. So a slow site gets fewer visitors and converts fewer of the ones it gets.

For a business paying for ads, it's worse: you're paying per click to send people to a page some of them never see.

Cause one: images nobody compressed

This is the biggest one by a distance, and it's the easiest to fix.

Photos come off a phone at three or four megabytes. On a website they should be a few hundred kilobytes. If nobody compressed them before uploading, every visitor downloads the full-size version.

A page with eight uncompressed photos is asking someone on mobile data to download thirty megabytes to read your opening hours.

Fix: compress every image before uploading. Free tools do it in seconds. Aim for under 200 KB each, and use WebP format where your platform supports it.

Cause two: too many plugins

Mostly a WordPress problem. Every plugin loads code on every page, whether that page uses it or not.

Sites arrive with thirty or forty plugins, half of them installed once for something that never launched. Each one adds weight.

Fix: list what's installed, deactivate anything you can't explain, and delete what stays deactivated for a month.

Cause three: cheap hosting

Hosting at two dollars a month exists, and there's a reason. Your site is sharing a server with hundreds of others, and when one of them gets busy, yours slows down.

You can't fix this with optimisation. The ceiling is the server.

Fix: if your site is well-built and still slow, hosting is the likely cause. Better hosting is usually a difference of a few dollars a month.

Cause four: fonts and scripts

Every custom font is a file to download. Every tracking pixel, chat widget and social feed is a request to somebody else's server, and you wait for all of them.

Analytics is worth it. A chat widget you never answer is not.

Fix: limit yourself to two font families and two weights each. Remove any script you can't tie to something you actually use.

Cause five: no caching

Without caching, your server rebuilds the entire page for every visitor, every time. With it, the page is built once and served from storage.

Fix: most hosts have caching available and switched off. Turn it on. It's often the single biggest improvement available, and it takes one click.

What to do first

In order, because the first one usually solves it:

• Compress the images
• Turn on caching
• Remove scripts and plugins you don't use
• Check the fonts
• Only then consider changing hosts

Most small business sites get from six seconds to under three with the first two alone.

Speed is one of the eight things on our website checklist, and it's the one people are most surprised to fail.