Why Is My Website Slow — and How Do I Fix It?

This is the single most common cause of slow websites. A photo taken on a modern phone is typically 4–8 megabytes. Put three of those on your homepage and you've just asked every visitor to download 20 megabytes of data before they can see anything.

The fix is compression and format. Images served on the web should be no larger than they need to be, compressed without visible quality loss, and ideally served in a modern format like WebP, which is significantly smaller than JPEG for the same visual quality.

If your site is on WordPress, a plugin like ShortPixel or Imagify handles this automatically. If your site is custom-built, your developer should be resizing and compressing images at upload time and converting them to WebP on output.

If "efficiently encode images" appears in your Lighthouse results and your score is below 75, this is likely your biggest single fix. It's also one of the faster things for a developer to implement. We can take care of it for you.

Every time a visitor loads your page, their browser makes requests to your server for every file — HTML, CSS, images, fonts. Without caching, the browser does this fresh every single visit. With caching, the browser saves a copy of files that don't change often and reuses them on the next visit.

Proper cache headers on static assets — images, stylesheets, fonts — can dramatically reduce load times for returning visitors and reduce the load on your server.

If you're on a managed WordPress host, caching is often built in. If you're not sure whether it's configured correctly, that uncertainty is itself a signal worth investigating.

When a browser reads your HTML and encounters a <script> tag, it stops — it won't render anything else until that script has downloaded and run. If you have six third-party scripts loading in the head of your page, your visitor is staring at a blank screen while all six of them load in sequence.

The fix is to defer scripts that don't need to run immediately. Most analytics tags, chat widgets, and tracking pixels can be deferred without any impact on functionality.

This is a developer fix. If it's showing up in your results and your score is below 65, it's worth getting someone in to address it.

Most small business websites accumulate third-party scripts quietly over time. A chat widget here. A heatmap tool there. A booking widget, a cookie consent banner, a Facebook pixel, a Google tag. Each one adds a network request, and some of them block the page from loading until they respond.

Audit what's running on your site. If you haven't used that heatmap tool in six months, remove it. Every script you eliminate is a faster page — and one fewer thing that can break.

Your Lighthouse score includes Time to First Byte — how long it takes your server to respond at all. If this is above 800 milliseconds, your server is the bottleneck, and no amount of image compression will fully fix the experience.

Shared hosting plans — the cheapest tier at most providers — put your website on a server alongside hundreds or thousands of other websites. When traffic spikes on any of them, yours slows down. A VPS or a managed hosting plan gives you dedicated resources.

If your TTFB is rated "Poor" and your score is below 60, your hosting is likely the first thing to address — not the last. This isn't a code fix; it's a conversation with your host or a platform migration. We handle both.

A content delivery network stores copies of your static files — images, fonts, CSS — on servers distributed around the world. When a visitor loads your page, they get those files from the server closest to them, rather than from wherever your origin server happens to be located.

Most modern hosting platforms include a CDN. Cloudflare offers a free tier that works with almost any website. If you're not using one, you should be.

When a developer writes CSS or JavaScript, it contains spaces, line breaks, comments, and readable variable names. All of that is useful while writing the code. None of it is necessary when the browser reads it. Minification strips all of that out, producing files that are 20–40% smaller with no change in how they work.

Modern build tools minify automatically. If your site is on WordPress, a plugin like WP Rocket or Autoptimize handles this. It's a relatively quick fix and often produces an immediate score improvement.

Custom fonts make a site look polished. They can also delay how quickly text appears. If your font files are large, loaded from a slow provider, or loaded in a way that blocks rendering, visitors may see a flash of invisible text while the right font loads in.

The fixes: preload your font files, use font-display: swap in your CSS so text renders immediately in a fallback font while the custom one loads, and limit yourself to two font families. Every additional weight and style is an additional file to download.