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Why is my website slow?
The page stutters on a phone, visitors leave before they have seen what you offer and you notice it in your enquiry count. Slowness almost always has a traceable cause. On the SME sites we open it is usually the same six. Here is how to measure where the time goes and what to do about it.
Five minutes to know where you stand
Open pagespeed.web.dev, enter your domain and read the Mobile tab rather than Desktop. Most of your visitors arrive on a phone and mobile is also the measurement Google works from.
The score on its own tells you little. Look at Largest Contentful Paint, the time until the biggest element is on screen. Under 2.5 seconds is fine. Above 4 seconds a visitor feels it and a share of them leave.
If you score 90 or more on mobile, speed is not your problem and the reason for thin enquiry volume sits elsewhere. Between 50 and 89 it is nearly always images and third party scripts. Below 50 something structural is wrong in the hosting, the theme or the plugins.
Where the seconds disappear
Six causes, ordered by how often we run into them.
1. Images straight from the camera
A 4 MB photo displayed 600 pixels wide. The browser still downloads the whole file. This is the most common cause and also the easiest to fix. Correctly scaled and saved as WebP, that same photo often weighs under 150 kB.
2. Plugins nobody uses any more
A test form, an old slider, a contact plugin that was replaced. Every active plugin loads its own CSS and JavaScript on every page, including pages where it does nothing. Twenty plugins on a six page site is not unusual.
3. Hosting that is too cheap
On shared hosting of a few euro per month your site sits next to hundreds of others. When the server is busy, your visitor waits. You spot this as a high server response time while the page itself is light.
4. No caching
Without caching WordPress rebuilds every page from the database on every visit. With caching the result is ready to serve and load time often halves. Plenty of sites have a cache plugin installed that was never configured properly.
5. Third party scripts on every page
A chat widget, a review widget, two tracking tools, a map and three fonts from an external server. Each one opens its own connection. Together they cost more than your entire page does.
6. A page builder on top of a page builder
A theme with its own builder, Elementor or a second builder on top and an add-on widget pack as well. The page then carries three layers of code for a layout one layer could have produced. A plugin rarely fixes this.
Three fixes you can make today
In this order, because the first one almost always returns the most.
Deal with the images
Sort your media library by file size and replace everything above 500 kB. Scale each photo to the width it is actually displayed at and export to WebP. A conversion plugin handles the existing library in one pass. Expect the largest single gain of the three.
Thin out the plugins
Take a backup first. Then deactivate anything you cannot describe the purpose of, one at a time, checking the site after each step. Whatever you have not missed after a week, delete properly. Deactivating alone leaves the files on the server.
Configure caching properly
Turn on page caching, compression and lazy loading for images below the first screen. Work in steps and test between them. Aggressive JavaScript combining breaks forms and booking modules, so leave that option for last.
If you are still under 50 on mobile after these three, the problem is the hosting or the way the theme is built. Those are choices rather than settings, so here is the honest arithmetic: moving to better hosting costs a one off piece of work, rebuilding on a light foundation costs more but also removes the underlying cause.
A slow site is almost never one big problem. It is twenty small ones nobody cleaned up.
That is why a checklist beats a rebuild as a first reflex. If you get stuck on one of the points below, we will take a look and tell you what we would tackle ourselves.
Your speed checklist
| Check | Where | What you want to see |
|---|---|---|
| Mobile score | pagespeed.web.dev, Mobile tab | 50 or more, ideally 90 |
| Largest Contentful Paint | Same report | Under 2.5 seconds |
| Heaviest image | Media library, sorted by size | Nothing above 500 kB |
| Active plugin count | WordPress, Plugins | Only what you can name |
| Caching active | Cache plugin or hosting panel | Page caching switched on |
| Server response time | PageSpeed, Diagnostics | Under 600 milliseconds |
| Third party scripts | PageSpeed, request list | Only what you actually use |
If you cannot get through it, our free tools take you a step further, or we look with you and you get the findings in writing even if you do nothing with us afterwards.
Slow website
How fast does an SME website need to be?
Aim for a Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds on mobile and a page weight under 1.5 MB. That is achievable on ordinary hosting without tricks. Chasing a score of 100 costs a lot of work for very few extra enquiries, while a score under 50 costs you visitors.
Does more expensive hosting really help?
It helps when your server response time is high while the page itself is light. You can see that in the Diagnostics section of PageSpeed. If your page weighs 6 MB, better hosting changes little: you then load the same problem slightly faster.
My site has been slow since the last update. What now?
Clear the cache first, both in your cache plugin and in your browser. If it stays slow, deactivate the most recently added or updated plugin and test again. If that fixes it, you have found the cause. Note down every step so you can roll back.
Is rebuilding better than optimising?
Rarely as a first step. Images, plugins and caching already bring most sites below the pain threshold. A rebuild makes sense when the site runs on an outdated theme with two page builders, because then you fight the foundation every month instead of a setting.
Let us take a look
30 minutes. We measure your site, tell you which of the six causes applies to you and in what order we would fix it.
More reading: Online visibility for SMEs · SEO agency · Results by sector