Why your website is slow, and how to check it in two minutes

Most business owners never see their own website the way their visitors do. You open it on the office Wi-Fi, on a fast laptop, with half of it already cached in your browser. It feels fine.

Your visitor opens it on a phone, on mobile data, for the first time. That is a very different experience, and it is the one that counts.

The good news: you don't need a developer to find out how your site really performs. You need two minutes and a free tool.

How to check your site in two minutes

1. Go to PageSpeed Insights, Google's free testing tool.
2. Paste your website address and press Analyze.
3. Look at the Mobile tab first. Most of your visitors are probably on a phone, and mobile is where slow sites hurt the most.

You will see a score from 0 to 100 and, if your site has enough visitors, a section with real-world data from Chrome users. That real-world section matters more than the score.

What the numbers actually mean

The report is full of technical terms. Three of them are worth understanding, because Google uses them to judge the experience on your pages. They are called Core Web Vitals:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): how long it takes for the main content to appear. Google considers 2.5 seconds or less good.
• Interaction to Next Paint (INP): how quickly the page reacts when someone taps or clicks. 200 milliseconds or less is good.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): how much the page jumps around while loading, like a button moving just as you try to press it. 0.1 or less is good.

Green is good, orange needs work, red is a problem. Don't panic over a score of 78 instead of 95. Do pay attention if your main content takes five or more seconds to show up on mobile.

The usual suspects

When we look at slow websites, we tend to find the same handful of causes:

Huge images. A photo straight from a camera or phone can weigh several megabytes. On a website it should usually be a fraction of that, in a modern format like WebP or AVIF, and sized for the screen it is shown on.

Too many plugins and scripts. Every chat widget, slider, tracking pixel and "nice to have" plugin adds code the browser has to download and run. Many sites carry scripts for tools nobody uses anymore.

Heavy themes and page builders. Visual builders make editing easy, but some load a lot of code on every page, whether that page needs it or not.

Web fonts loaded from elsewhere. Several font families and weights, loaded from a third-party server, can delay the moment text appears. On one of our own sites, self-hosting the fonts removed most of the page weight. We mention it in our note on how we moved a content platform off WordPress without losing traffic.

Cheap or outdated hosting. If the server itself is slow to respond, nothing else you optimise will fully make up for it.

No caching. Without caching, the server rebuilds the same page from scratch for every visitor.

What you can fix yourself, and what you can't

Some fixes are within reach for most site owners:

• Compress and resize images before uploading them.
• Remove plugins and widgets you no longer use.
• Turn on the caching option your hosting or platform offers.

Others need a developer: reworking a heavy theme, loading scripts only where they are needed, moving to better hosting, or rebuilding on a faster setup. Sometimes a few targeted fixes are enough. Sometimes the site is built on a foundation that will always fight you, and a rebuild costs less in the long run than patching. If you are weighing that option, read what you are actually paying for in a website today.

What speed does, and what it doesn't

A fast website is a better experience for every visitor, and it removes a reason for people to leave before they have even seen what you offer. Google also looks at page experience as one of many signals.

But we want to be honest: speed alone will not bring you customers. A fast site with no visitors is still a site with no visitors. Speed is part of a solid technical foundation, alongside a site that works properly on mobile, is set up correctly for search engines, and does what your business needs. Marketing is what brings people to it.

A quick checklist

• Test your homepage and your most important page on PageSpeed Insights, mobile tab.
• Check whether your main content appears within 2.5 seconds.
• Look at the largest images on your site and how much they weigh.
• List the plugins, widgets and scripts you actually use.
• Ask your hosting provider whether caching is turned on.
• Test again after every change, so you know what actually helped.

Want a second pair of eyes?

If you have run the test and you are not sure what to make of the results, send us your website through the contact form. We'll do a free technical check of speed, mobile and setup, and tell you plainly what we found and what is worth fixing. No sales pitch.