Why your website is slow, and how to fix it

Test it the way your customers experience it: your phone, mobile data rather than the wifi, from cold. If nothing readable appears in about three seconds, you are losing people before your site has said a word - and because they leave before doing anything, nothing in your enquiry numbers will ever show you it happened.

The good news is that slowness in small business sites is remarkably predictable. It is nearly always the same five causes, in roughly the same order.

The five causes

1. Images straight off a camera or a phone

   The single biggest cause, and it is not close. A photo from a modern phone is often four or five megabytes and several thousand pixels wide, being displayed in a box a few hundred pixels across. The browser downloads the whole thing and then throws most of it away. Resized and saved properly, the same picture is a small fraction of the size and looks identical.

2. Too many plugins

   A WordPress site with thirty plugins is loading thirty sets of code on every page, including on pages that use none of them. Each was added for a good reason and none was ever removed. This is the second biggest cause and the easiest to be in denial about.

3. Fonts

   Every custom font is another download that blocks text from appearing. Two weights of two fonts is a design. Nine weights of four fonts is a delay, and nobody can tell the difference on the page.

4. Third-party scripts

   Chat widgets, analytics, pixels, booking embeds, review carousels, cookie tools. Each one is a request to somebody else's server, and your page is only as fast as the slowest of them. A single badly behaved widget can add whole seconds, and you will not find it by looking at your own code.

5. Cheap shared hosting

   Real, but usually blamed first when it should be blamed last. Fix the four above and most sites are fast enough on modest hosting. If the server itself takes over a second to answer at all, then it is the host.

How to measure it properly

Google's PageSpeed Insights is free, takes a URL, and gives you both a score and the specific reasons for it. Two things about reading it that save a lot of wasted effort.

• Read the mobile tab, not the desktop one. Desktop scores flatter every site and are not what most of your visitors experience.
• Ignore the overall number and read the opportunities list underneath. The score is a summary; the list is the instruction. "Properly size images" at the top means you have found your problem in one step.
• Do not chase 100. Going from 40 to 80 is transformative and often an afternoon. Going from 90 to 100 is days of work nobody will ever notice.

What to fix first

In this order, because it is descending order of effect per hour spent.

1. Resize and compress every image

   Nothing on a small business site needs to be wider than about 2,000 pixels, and most things need far less. Free tools like Squoosh do this in a browser without installing anything. On many sites this one step halves the page weight.

2. Delete plugins you are not using

   Deactivating is not deleting. Go through the list honestly and remove anything you cannot explain the purpose of. Take a backup first.

3. Cut the fonts back

   Two families at most, and only the weights actually used on the page.

4. Audit the third-party scripts

   For each one, ask what it earns you. A chat widget nobody uses, a pixel from a campaign that ended last year, an analytics tool you have never opened - all of them are costing every visitor time.

5. Then, and only then, look at hosting

   If the site is still slow after the four above, the server is a fair suspect.

Why it is worth the afternoon

Speed is unusual in that it pays twice. It reduces the number of people who give up before the page appears, and Google measures it directly as part of how it ranks pages - so the same work that keeps a visitor also helps more of them arrive. Almost nothing else you can do to a website has both effects at once.

It is also the one improvement nobody will ever compliment you on. A fast site simply feels like nothing happened, which is exactly the point.