Why your website is slower than you think (and what to do about it)
Most website owners judge speed by feel. You open your own site, it loads quickly, done. But you're on a fast network, on a recent laptop, with the page probably already in your browser cache. Your visitor is on a phone on the train with patchy reception. That's a different story.
Speed is not a luxury. It's a baseline requirement. Google factors it into your search rankings. Visitors leave after three seconds of waiting. And on mobile, where most traffic comes from, every tenth of a second counts.
How do you measure it?
Not by feel, but with data. Google PageSpeed Insights is free and gives you a score plus specific improvements. Always test the mobile version, not the desktop version. The scores that matter are the Core Web Vitals: how quickly your page becomes visible, how quickly it responds to a click, and how much the layout shifts during loading.
A score below 50 on mobile is a problem. Between 50 and 90, there's room for improvement. Above 90, you're in good shape.
The three most common causes
Most slow websites suffer from the same three things.
Images that are too large
This is by far the most common cause. A photo uploaded straight from the camera is often 3 to 5 megabytes. That's ten times larger than necessary. Images should be compressed and in the right format. WebP is now the standard for the web. A good rule of thumb: no single image on your site should be larger than 200 kilobytes.
Too many scripts and plugins
Every tool you add to your website loads code. Analytics, chat widgets, social media buttons, cookie banners, fonts, tracking pixels. Individually, it's negligible. Combined, it can mean dozens of extra requests and hundreds of kilobytes of code. For every addition, ask yourself: does anyone actually use this?
Slow hosting
Cheap shared hosting means your server also runs the sites of hundreds of others. During quiet moments, you won't notice. During busy ones, you will. If your site is consistently slow regardless of what you optimise, hosting is often the bottleneck.
What can you do yourself?
Three things you can tackle without technical knowledge:
Go through your media library and replace oversized images with compressed versions.
List all external scripts on your site and remove what you're not actively using.
Ask your hosting provider what type of hosting you have and what the options are for better performance.
If you have someone technical to help: enable caching, set up lazy loading for images, and minify your CSS and JavaScript.
Speed is maintenance, not a one-off action
There's little point in optimising your site once and then forgetting about it. Every new page, image or plugin can slow things down again. Include speed in your regular maintenance. Measure it every quarter, just as you update your content.
Layer by layer, just like our websites.