“The website’s slow” is one of the most common things a business owner tells us, and one of the vaguest. Slow for whom? On what? Since when? The good news is that it almost never means you need a new website. It usually means a few heavy things you can find in an afternoon.
Here’s how to find out what’s slowing your site down, from the work we do on sites built with WordPress, Elementor and similar page builders.
First, measure it properly
Your site feels fast to you because you’re on office Wi-Fi, on a good computer, and your browser has most of it saved already. Your customers are on a phone, on mobile data, seeing it for the first time.
- Run your home page through Google’s PageSpeed Insights (free) and look at the mobile result.
- Open it on your own phone with Wi-Fi switched off.
- Note the total page size. The typical Dundee business home page in our benchmark was 1.7 MB. If yours is several times that, the weight is your problem.
The usual suspects, in order
1. Photos
By a distance the biggest cause. Photos saved as PNG files, uploaded at camera size, or used as full-width backgrounds at several megabytes each. On one shop we looked at, five banner photos made up 6.9 MB of a 9.5 MB page. (The full story.)
What to check: are any images on your home page over half a megabyte? Are photos saved as PNG? Are they much wider than the space they fill?
2. Tracking and marketing scripts
Analytics, Tag Manager, the Facebook pixel, the TikTok pixel, chat widgets, review widgets. Each is small-ish and useful. Together they can outweigh the rest of the page. On one site we checked, over a megabyte of the page was tracking scripts.
What to check: list every tool your site loads. Is each one still used? Is anything loaded twice?
3. Page-builder add-ons
Add-on packs for page builders bring whole libraries: sliders, animations, icon sets with hundreds of icons. We’ve seen a 455 KB icon font loaded on every page for thirteen icons.
What to check: which add-on plugins are active, and which features of each do you actually use?
4. Fonts
Four font families, each in six weights, is a lot of downloading before a word appears. Most sites need two families and three or four weights.
5. Sliders and video at the top of the page
The first thing on the page is the thing that decides how fast your site feels. A five-slide carousel or an autoplaying video there makes every visitor wait for the heaviest thing on the page first.
6. The server
If a page takes more than a second or two before anything at all starts to arrive, the problem is behind the scenes: cheap shared hosting, no caching, a database that needs attention. That’s one for your host or developer, and it’s often the easiest to fix of the lot.
What usually doesn’t need doing
- A new website. Almost never the first answer to “it’s slow”.
- Another speed plugin. Stacking optimisation plugins often causes as many problems as it solves.
- Chasing a perfect score. The goal is a page that shows its main content quickly on a phone, not a number.
What good looks like
On our benchmark’s phone test, the main content of the typical Dundee business home page appeared after about 5 seconds. The typical one of twelve recent builds of ours showed it in under 3. The three shops we sped up this autumn went from as much as 56 seconds down to between 3 and 11, without a redesign; the slowest of the three is now held back mainly by the tracking scripts the business uses for its advertising.
If your site is slow and you’d like someone to find out why, that’s our website speed work. If you’re building new, our web design starts light. Tell us which site.
Got a problem like this? Good. We like those.
Tell us what you’re dealing with and we’ll tell you honestly what we’d do.
