Why your website is slow and what to do about it

A slow website loses visitors before they have even read a word. Here is why it happens and what can actually be done about it.

Research consistently shows that visitors will leave a webpage if it takes more than three seconds to load. For mobile users on slower connections, the tolerance is even lower. If your website is slow, it is costing you enquiries, customers, and credibility, even if nobody has ever told you that.

Here are the most common reasons websites run slowly and what can be done about each one.

Your images are too large

This is the single most common cause of slow websites, and it is almost always fixable. When a photograph is taken on a modern camera or phone, the file size is enormous. Uploading that photograph directly to your website means visitors have to download a file that is far larger than they need.

The fix: compress your images before uploading them. Tools like Squoosh (squoosh.app) and TinyPNG (tinypng.com) are free and reduce file sizes dramatically without any visible loss of quality. As a rough guide, no image on a standard website page needs to be larger than 200kb.

If your website is on WordPress, a plugin like ShortPixel or Smush can automatically compress images as you upload them.

You are not using a content delivery network

A content delivery network, or CDN, stores copies of your website on servers around the world so that visitors are served your site from a server close to them rather than from wherever your hosting is based. For most small websites, the improvement is modest, but it is meaningful and usually free.

Cloudflare (cloudflare.com) offers a free CDN that most websites can connect to in about 20 minutes. If you are not already using one, it is worth setting up.

Your hosting is too slow

Not all hosting is equal. Budget shared hosting, the kind that costs a few pounds a month, often places hundreds or thousands of websites on the same server. When those servers are busy, your website slows down.

If your website has been on the same cheap hosting plan for years and you have noticed it getting slower, it is worth considering an upgrade. Hosting providers like SiteGround, Kinsta, or Cloudways offer managed WordPress hosting that is meaningfully faster than the cheapest shared plans.

Too many plugins or scripts loading on every page

Every third-party element on your website, whether that is a chatbot, a cookie consent tool, a social media feed, or an analytics tracker, adds to the time it takes for your page to load. Over time, websites accumulate these elements without anyone checking whether each one is still needed.

Go through your website and audit everything that is loading on every page. Anything that is no longer needed should be removed. Anything that can be loaded after the main page content should be set to do that.

How to check how fast your website actually is

Google PageSpeed Insights (pagespeed.web.dev) is a free tool that analyses any web page and gives you a score out of 100 for both mobile and desktop speed. It also tells you specifically what is causing the slowdown. Run your homepage through it and focus on the issues it flags as having the highest impact.

A score of 70 or above is a reasonable target for most small business websites. Above 90 is excellent. Below 50 means there are likely significant issues worth addressing.